EFL teachers professional identity development through potentially exploitable pedagogical activities

Potentially Exploitable Pedagogical Activities (PEPAs) help teachers problematize teaching and learning puzzles. The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of PEPAs in EFL teachers professional identity development. A PEPA program was run in which two EFL teachers participated. The program took around a year to familiarize the teachers with the theoretical and practical aspects of PEPAs. The teachers tried to do PEPAs to understand puzzles in their classes. During the program, interactionally oriented narratives written by the two EFL teachers were collected. The narratives were analyzed based on the Teachers Professional Identity Scale developed by Karaolis and Philippou (2019), including five indicators: self-efficacy, professional commitment, task orientation, work motivation, and future perspective. The findings showed the development in the five indicators after the two EFL teachers participated in the PEPA program, indicating that PEPAs had a positive and constructive role in developing EFL teachers professional identity. It can be concluded that PEPAs help the teachers develop their syllabuses based on practice-as-research. Through using PEPAs, EFL teachers are involved in a never-ending research process to understand and solve their teaching puzzles.