Abstract
Teachers` job is not an easy one and it requires much study and pedagogical training. Before going to the classroom and taking the role of teachers, TTs always report much anxiety and doubt about their knowledge, pedagogical skills, the interaction with the learners and the teaching activity as such. The aim of this study is to find answers to the following questions: Are TTs aware of teacher role identity? What is the relationship between their understanding of teacher role identity and the anxieties they experience before going into teaching? The study uses data triangulation (observation, focus group discussion and sentence completion tasks). The outcomes relate to psychological, pedagogical and interactional aspects of the topic under investigation. The conclusions we have reached enhance the idea that the ways in which TTs perceive teacher role identity, corroborated with representations of the learner, as well as with representations of their own selves, go hand in hand with their anxieties as effective teachers-to-be.
Key words: TT; TTs` anxieties; teacher role identity; representations of learners; representations of selves