A phenomenological study on pre-service EFL teachers' identity development: Reflections on possible selves before, during and after emergency remote teaching

As of 2020, the sudden transition to distance education during the pandemic with COVID-19, which has taken the whole world under its influence, undoubtedly brought along many education-oriented problems. As a result of the examinations and reports created, it is revealed that compulsory distance education has damaged the education (see, UNESCO, 2020; World Bank, 2019; World Bank, 2020; World Economic Forum, 2020). In an educational process where this damage is considered, it cannot be expected that an individual's professional development process has not been affected. Therefore, in this study, it is aimed to observe this potential change in reflections of the professional selves of pre-service EFL teachers and to investigate their possible teacher selves, to conduct a phenomenological study and to shed light on teacher education. The aim of the research is to compare the professional identities that they foresee before the compulsory distance education experience and the professional identities they develop during and after the emergency remote education according to the possible selves theory of professional identity development in English as a Foreign Language teacher candidates. By examining the beliefs pre-service teachers have about their possible selves, it is aimed to obtain information about the motivation of prospective EFL teachers towards the profession and to analyze the self-perceptions of their professional identities. For this purpose, the study was conducted with pre-service teachers from the Department of English Language Teaching in their last year. In this study, which was designed as a phenomenological study, group interviews, reflective journals and open-ended questionnaires were used to collect data.