Language Teacher Professional Identity Aymen Elsheikh and Elham Yahia Abstract Language teacher identity (LTI) has received a lot of attention during the last three decades. As the topic of professional identity is broad and multifaceted, the purpose of this chapter is to highlight the major themes that have emerged in the literature to date, namely LTI in professional contexts, the role of socio-political and economic contexts inLTI, the nexus between identity and knowledge, and how LTI relates to professionalism. The chapter argues that, although there is a plethora of LTI research, language scholars and practitioners need to engage more critically with and investigate how professional identities are constructed within current dominant discourses such as globalization, superdiversity, transnationalism, multilingualism, among others. The chapter concludes with overarching research and pedagogical implications in addition to the relationship between LTI and professionalism. Keywords Identity · Language teacher identify · Knowledge · Teacher knowledge 1 Introduction Given the unprecedented rate of the process of globalization and the concomitant spread of the English language around the globe, it has become more imperative to examine the socio-cultural and political discourses of education in general and language education in particular. In recent years, this issue has been more compli- cated due to the neoliberal onslaught and the challenge posed by what scholars have referred to as ‘superdiversity’ (Vertovec, 2007). While superdiversity refers to how populations have become more increasingly diverse than ever before, neoliberalism has been defined as “the philosophy of economic and social transformation taking place according to the logic of free market doctrines that dictate the way economies A. Elsheikh (B ) Texas A&M University at Qatar, Doha, Qatar e-mail: aymen.elsheikh@qatar.tamu.edu E. Yahia St John’s University, New York, USA e-mail: elhamyahia@yahoo.com © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Coombe et al. (eds.), Professionalizing Your English Language Teaching, Second Language Learning and Teaching, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34762-8_3 27