Reflections about teaching english in a bilingual school and in a regular basic school: developing teaching identification

Abstract

Finding and developing your own identity can be a difficult lifelong process for teachers. For that reason, this study aims to reflect about the differences and similarities found when teaching English in different contexts, considering the experiences of being a teacher in a bilingual and a non-bilingual school in Fortaleza, Ceará, and analyzing how such situations could impact the teaching identity of a student-teacher during the undergraduate course. Besides, this paper focuses on reflecting about the struggles and specificities of the two experiences mentioned above, examining how the principles of the Communicative Language Teaching Approach (CLT) were applied in each. Moreover, it will try to showcase the importance of self-reflection in a teacher's journey, especially when you are still starting to teach and develop your own teaching identities. The data used to base the research were lesson plans collected from the experiences in the two schools, and, most importantly, reflective diaries about the classes, gathered along the process.