Saeedeh Esmae’li - PhD. Candidate, English Language Dept., Sheikhbahaee University, Baharestan, Iran
Katayoon Afzali - Assistant Professor, English Language Dept., Sheikhbahaee University, Baharestan, Iran

In the context of universities, teachers are obliged to obey strict curricula and rigid teaching practices while they face high linguistic and cultural diversity among their students. To be fair and to do justice, teachers should use equitable teaching methods in their classroom which could be affected by teachers’ understanding of students’ identities. This study aims to investigate how teachers make sense of students’ identities and how this understanding influence the teachers’ instructional decisions. The paper reports on a case study which seeks to analyze a case of an English teacher who employed narrating events to reflect on and report critical incidents with her colleagues in order to understand her students’ identities. The participant teacher and her colleagues reflected retrospectively and introspectively on the narrated critical incidents for 5 sessions. The analysis of the narrations and reflections revealed that as the teacher engaged in the practice of narrating events and discourse analysis, she began to shift her view about learners’ identity from passive learners to agentive learners, and so she changed her instructional decisions from traditional teaching to dialogic teaching. This study has implications for teacher training and teacher development.

Classroom Discourse; Narrating Events; Critical Incidents; Reflection; Identity