EJAL Article template Focus on ELT Journal Vol 3, Issue 1, 2021 ISSN: 2687-5381  Corresponding Author: rabiairem.demirci@omu.edu.tr Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to Focus on ELT Journal. Book Review ‘‘Language Teacher Educator Identity’’ Rabia İrem Demirci Res. Assist., Ondokuz Mayıs University, Turkey, rabiairem.demirci@omu.edu.tr APA Citation: Demirci, R. İ. (2021). Book Review: Language Teacher Educator Identity. Focus on ELT Journal, 3(1), 81-83. https://doi.org/10.14744/felt.2021.00049 Language Teacher Educator Identity, Gary Barkhuizen. Cambridge University Press. London, UK (2021). 92 pp., Paperback: $18.88, ISBN 978-1-108–81266-5. The notion of professional identity has gained prominence in many professional fields, especially in education with supportive policies of universities around the world. As language teacher educators, we need to better understand the roles we are ascribed to carry the language teacher education a step further. In Barkhuizen’s (2021) book Language Teacher Educator Identity, being language teacher educators in the field of language teaching and learning were examined from varying perspectives. Barkhuizen is currently working as a professor in Applied Language Studies and Linguistics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. As a researcher, his areas of expertise consist of language teacher education, teacher identity, study abroad, narrative research in applied linguistics. Along with publishing several books on identity, he was involved in many projects adopting a narrative inquiry approach that he employs in Language Teacher Educator Identity book, as well. mailto:rabiairem.demirci@omu.edu.tr mailto:rabiairem.demirci@omu.edu.tr https://doi.org/10.14744/felt.2021.00049 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8884-2899 Demirci, R. İ. / Focus on ELT Journal, 2021, 3(1) 82 Focus on ELT www.focusonelt.com The book includes the description of different types of language teacher educators working in a range of professional and institutional contexts to comprehend the identities that language teacher educators are attributed to in different working contexts. This book not only presents theoretical aspects of language teacher educator identity but also provides personal narratives to support theoretical parts with practical sides to offer the reader to conceptualize the perfect matches and ill-matches between theory and practice regarding language teacher educator identity. With its comprehensive contents and reader-friendly style, the book may serve as a guide and a handbook for practitioners in language teaching fields from all levels of educational systems, but it is especially geared towards academics in the language teacher education field. To present an overview of the book of 95 pages in total, it is composed of five main sections respectively titled as; 1) Who Are Language Teacher Educators?, 2) Teacher Educators Reflecting on Their Identity, 3) What Do Language Teacher Educators Do?, 4) Further Professional Development of Language Teacher Educators, and 5) Future Research on Language Teacher Educator Identity. This work aims to examine and understand how teachers learn to become teachers, what they know, when they know how to teach, how they continue to develop professionally over time, and how their teacher identities relate to what they do, both inside and outside the classroom. In section 1, Who Are Language Teacher Educators?, Barkhuizen (2021) introduces the topic by addressing basic questions and informs readers about what the work covers and what it does not. After this brief introduction of the work, the indispensability of the language teachers, the content and pedagogy of teacher education, and the teacher educators as core constituents of the knowledge-base of language teacher education (LTE) is highlighted by stressing the significance of pedagogy education and pedagogical knowledge. The second part of the section starts with the author's personal narrative about his first formal experience as a kind of language teacher educator. After briefly discussing the narrative, language teacher educators- their history, their beliefs, experiences, roles and practices, emotions and desires, and their moral stance were presented in a straightforward way, dwelling on different types of language teacher educator types, including a brief statement of prominent identity theories. Teacher Educators Reflecting on Their Identity is the name of section 2, which mainly discusses a study that aimed to explore the construction of teacher educator identities considering identity experiences of a group of seven teacher educators enrolled in a doctoral program at a public university in Colombia, South America. Barkhuizen (2021) used qualitative method and interviewed the participants about their lived and imagined experiences avoiding direct questions. However, before each interview excerpt, we see a short biography to introduce the teacher educator to help readers to comment appropriately and to bridge the gap between experiences of teacher education and their identities. Just after the author presented some examples from the interviews exploring the experiences- reflecting their identities- of the teacher educators were given, he discussed different dimensions encountered in the statements of the participants. Following the discussion of the main themes related to teacher educator identity, they are re-organized and refined, and main identity keywords extracted from the interviews are defined, and identity-related categories are proposed in a table with brief descriptions of the categories. What Do Language Teacher Educators Do? is introduced as section 3 in the book. In this section, what language teacher educators do and to what extent their experiences intersect with their teacher educator identities were introduced. After an extensive introduction, the process of becoming a language teacher educator is overviewed, stressing the potential identity tension experienced during the process. The importance of pedagogy education in LTE was highlighted, and pedagogy-related 'Must-haves' of becoming a language teacher educator were Demirci, R. İ. / Focus on ELT Journal, 2021, 3(1) 83 Focus on ELT www.focusonelt.com elaborately offered. Towards the end of this chapter, the author emphasized the dynamic nature of language teacher educator identities, highlighting the fact that they are shaped and reshaped in the transition process. The author also touched upon the contributions of having a sit in an institutional or community service by the faculty along with being a researcher and their effects on teacher educators’ identities. At the end of the section, the author presented a language teacher identity conceptual framework that includes a discussion of aspects less frequently examined in the literature and concluded the section with a personal narrative, in which he reflected on some of his service and leadership contributions. Section 4, Further Professional Development of Language Teacher Educators, mainly discusses teacher educators' reasons for continuing professional development referencing the interview statements of the same group of seven teacher educators enrolled in a doctoral program at a public university in Colombia. Barkhuizen (2021) mentioned professional development preference reasons which have different focuses such as Personal-focused development, Academic-focused development, Practice-focused development, Research- focused development, and Student teacher- focused development and clarified these focuses by matching the reasons with the statements of the participants. The last section, Future Research on Language Teacher Educator Identity, offers forty questions to encourage further research into the identities of language teacher educators. The questions were gathered under categories using some keywords to enlighten the path for the researcher. To-the-point further suggestions were made putting the focus on the importance of personal experiences, appropriateness of the questions considering the research context, and he ended the section with a personal narrative about his research interest and passion. All in all, I can fairly state that this book is an engaging resource for the target readers, especially with its narrative-based style. In my humble opinion, this book is a worthy attempt to fill the gap that language teacher educators have been neglected in the research literature in language teaching and learning. Last but not least, the book has also highlighted the need to focus attention on the work they do and signaled the broad scope of academic potential that exists to be investigated, particularly that in relation to the development of their identities. Although there is nearly no room for criticism, it may not be wrong to suggest organizing the sections in a better way to make the readers easily follow the subject matter. Also, although the author's personal narratives clothe the book, it could have been better to give more place to the theoretical side of language teacher educator identity to provide a comprehensive understanding. Overall, I believe the book is a notable contribution to the field and a stunning example for future works. Considering all of these, this book deserves to be counted among the introductory books in the field of language teacher education. Disclosure Statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. References Barkhuizen, G. (2021). Language Teacher Educator Identity. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108874083 Copyrights Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the Journal. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND) (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108874083