Speaker
Description
This paper examines how one Vietnamese EFL university teacher narrates the relationship between research engagement and researcher identity. In Vietnamese higher education, research has increasingly become part of teachers’ responsibilities, yet engagement in research does not necessarily lead to a stable sense of being a researcher. This issue is especially relevant for EFL teachers, whose academic work is shaped by teaching responsibilities, institutional research expectations, publication pressure, doctoral requirements, and uneven research support. Drawing on narrative inquiry, the study explores the participant’s research journey and examines how research-related experiences are interpreted as part of researcher identity development. The analysis is guided by Clandinin and Connelly’s three-dimensional narrative inquiry space to examine how the participant organises research-related experiences across time, social relations, and professional settings. At the same time, Åkerlind’s work on academics’ growth and development as researchers is used as a sensitising resource for examining how the participant makes sense of researcher development within this narrative. Data will be generated through narrative interviews and a research journey timeline, inviting the participant to connect earlier research experiences with publication work, institutional responsibilities, teaching–research tensions, ongoing academic development, and future research aspirations. Rather than assuming a direct progression from research engagement to researcher identity, the study examines how such engagement is interpreted, negotiated, and sometimes questioned as a basis for being a researcher. The paper offers practical implications for supporting EFL lecturers’ research development through mentoring, meaningful recognition, and institutional conditions that help teachers make research part of their professional selves.
Biography
Nguyen Thi My Hanh is a lecturer of English at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Information Technology, Hoa Lu University, Ninh Binh, Vietnam, and a doctoral student in English Studies. Her academic interests centre on language teacher identity, teacher research, researcher identity, narrative inquiry, and English language education in Vietnamese higher education. Her current doctoral work explores how EFL university teachers understand and narrate their developing researcher identities within their academic work. She is interested in the ways teachers talk about research in everyday professional life, especially when they balance teaching responsibilities with institutional expectations for research and publication. Her work pays attention to issues such as confidence, legitimacy, agency, and recognition in teachers’ developing sense of themselves as researchers. In both her teaching and doctoral study, she is concerned with how EFL teachers in Vietnam negotiate professional identities in a changing higher education context, where teaching, research, and institutional expectations increasingly intersect.
| Affiliate type | University |
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