An Investigation of the Relational Aspects of L2 Teacher Pride in the Turkish Context: A Retrodictive Qualitative Modeling Approach

ABSTRACT The present paper explores the notion of language teacher pride (LTP), as advanced by Mairitsch et al. (2024), as a significant construct for EFL/ESL teachers given its ties to social, systemic, and economic factors. Since the study undertakes an in‐depth analysis of LTP and attempts to identify LTP archetypes, we employed qualitative retrodictive modeling (QRM) to identify specific characteristics of each LTP archetype. The participants were 35 Turkish EFL teachers of various ages with varying experience levels from various schools and educational backgrounds so that we could capture the variety in terms of experience, working conditions, and educational backgrounds. The reason is that all these factors could impact LTP. The data were collected through semi‐structured interviews. As a second step, we conducted in‐depth interviews with teachers representing each archetype we identified, including intrinsic, extrinsic, tech‐savvy, projector, and desperate LTP archetypes. The findings indicated that LTP is a highly fragile construct affected by several social, systemic, and economic factors. The results also demonstrated that LTP is a significant part of EFL teachers’ psychology with strong ties to teacher motivation, self‐efficacy, self‐esteem, well‐being, self‐confidence, and desire to participate in professional development activities.