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Language teacher identity (LTI) has emerged as a central construct in language teacher education research over the past three decades, yet the field remains theoretically fragmented. Studies have drawn selectively on psychological, sociocultural, or post-structuralist traditions in relative isolation, producing partial accounts that either overemphasise the individual dimensions of professional selfhood, reduce identity to a product of social forces and discourse, or undertheorize the role of power and institutional conditions in shaping what professional identities are available to teachers. This paper argues that a comprehensive understanding of LTI requires a critical engagement with all three traditions — not to treat them as equally valid alternatives, but to identify what each contributes and what each leaves unresolved.
Through a critical review of foundational and contemporary scholarship, this paper traces the intellectual development of LTI research across three major theoretical traditions. The psychological tradition, rooted in the work of James (1890) and Erikson (1950, 1968), established identity as a scientific construct and foregrounded its developmental and cognitive dimensions, but treats social context as backdrop rather than as the constitutive medium of identity formation. The sociocultural tradition, grounded in Vygotsky's (1978) cultural-historical psychology and extended through Wenger's (1998) communities of practice, relocated identity formation to the social activity, cultural tools, and communities through which it is constituted — addressing the psychological tradition's individualism while providing a more precise account of the mechanisms through which context shapes professional selfhood. The post-structuralist tradition, associated with Foucault and Norton (2000), contributed a critical sensitivity to discourse and power but tends to underspecify the practical mechanisms through which teachers actively negotiate their identities within constraining conditions.
Building on this critical review, the paper proposes Holland et al.'s (1998) practice theory of self and identity — situated firmly within the sociocultural tradition and drawing on Vygotsky and Bakhtin — as the framework best suited to the study of LTI in commercially driven institutional contexts. This framework accounts simultaneously for the social constitution of identity through figured worlds and cultural artefacts, the biographical sediment teachers bring to their professional lives, and the agentive capacity to author one's own professional self within institutional and discursive constraints. The paper concludes by identifying persistent gaps in the existing literature — particularly the underrepresentation of private language education contexts and Global South settings — and calls for theoretically grounded, contextually sensitive research that takes seriously both the conditions shaping language teacher identity and the agentive processes through which teachers navigate them.
