"When I am teaching German, I put on a persona": Exploring lived experiences of teaching a foreign language.

The field of teacher identity is a complex area that has attracted the interest of numerous researchers over the last decades. Within this field the topic of the identity of language teachers has recently emerged. Many of the studies devoted to language teachers’ identity have focused on the teachers as object of study, (Morgan and Clarke 2011; Ying Cheung et al. 2015; Sachs 2005) little attention, however, has been paid in relation to how teachers themselves make sense of their experience of teaching a foreign language. This present study adresses this underexplored aspect by using a pheneomenological approach, focusing on the lived experience of two language teachers. The method used facilitates an insight into the lived world of language teachers. It aims to offer a relevant contribution to the teacher identity research, in particular in how language teachers experience their self; it also reveals a different insight in relation to the way multiple identities are experienced by language teachers