VISUALS SPEAK: Using drawings to unravel the perceptions of the language teaching profession

Agency and professional development are highly linked to the teachers’ professional identity (Beauchamp & Thomas, 2009). Apart from that, teaching beliefs and assumptions might have an immense impact on one’s perceptions of the teaching profession, thereby influencing practices and behaviors. For this reason, uncovering how teacher identity is formed could be helpful to highlight views and concerns regarding professional development of pre-service and in-service teachers. With this mind, in this present study, the drawings and memos obtained from the in-service and senior pre-service EFL teachers were investigated and the visual content analysis was adopted to gain an insight into their understanding of the teaching profession. Consequently, the findings illustrated that perceptions of pre-service and in-service EFL teachers are mainly centered around teachers’ attitudes towards learners and teacher roles.