Abstract
I Introduction
China’s teacher education task is unique. With a 240 million student population at various levels of education (MOE China, 2010a), 13 million teachers, and with 470,000 English language teachers in secondary schools alone (Wang, 2007), the shortage of qualified teachers is acute. The problem was aggravated in 2001 when the Chinese Ministry of Education started to push for an earlier start of English teaching from Junior Secondary 1 to Primary 3 (MOE China, 2001). How China is dealing with English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher education while at the same time improving the teaching and learning of English should be of both practical and academic interest to the outside world.
II Teacher education
Teaching is now a well-established profession, well beyond the ‘undervalued, professional female babysitter’ stage (Lewis & Hill-Jackson, 2010, p. 250). The effects of teachers and teacher preparation on student achievement have been found to be even ‘stronger than the influences of student background factors, such as poverty, language background, and minority status’ (Darling-Hammond, 2000, p. 33). Over the last five decades or so, teacher education has been conceptualized and studied as a training problem, a learning problem, and a policy problem (Cochran-Smith, 2004). Teacher education as a profession has been striving for both epistemic and moral purposes (Sockett, 2010). Researchers have been exploring the integration and balancing of enduring issues such as teaching and learning, content and pedagogy, knowledge and behaviour, theory and practice, the individual and the social, goals, process and product, and policy, practice, and research, to name only a few.
Second language teacher education (SLTE) research has also received increasing attention. Recent years have seen the publication of a number of important volumes on specific topics such as strategies for teacher learning (Richards & Farrell, 2005), sociocultural perspectives in teacher education (Johnson, 2009), and on general guides to second language teacher education (Burns & Richards, 2009). However, given the importance of teachers in the second/foreign language learning process, it is surprising that teacher education research still remains a relatively neglected area in applied linguistics, compared to the attention given to language teaching and language learning.
One of the major issues of SLTE has remained the knowledge base (the ‘what’) of teacher education. It has become standard practice that most SLTE programmes will have to include courses on the nature of language, on teaching methodology, and on how people learn languages (Richards, 2008). Despite the lack of challenges to SLTE curricula, what constitutes the teacher’s expertise or competencies has always been at the centre of debates. A common distinction is made between theory and practice, with the former obtainable relatively easily through standard training programmes at universities, and the latter a life-long endeavour of the individual teacher in ‘the swampy lowlands’ (Schön, 2001) of professional practice.
Most of the research has focused not on the initial training, but on on-the-job development of teachers. Foci on different ways of integrating theory and practice at various stages of teacher development gave rise to notions such as ‘Pedagogical Content Knowledge’ (PCK) (Shulman, 1986), ‘Personal, Practical Knowledge’ (PPK) (Elbaz, 1983), and ‘apprenticeship of observation’ (Lortie, 2002). From the time when theories are learned to the moment when a teacher becomes a master teacher, the continuum is long and complex. At one end, the beginning teacher’s social, emotional, and professional struggles have been extensively studied (Australian Council of Deans of Education, 1998). At the other end, we expect to see not just the episteme and the phronesis, but also the artistry of teaching (Eisner, 2002). Teacher education is a complex endeavour that requires systemic examinations of the dynamic and interactive processes underlying the teacher’s teaching and learning in their respective school contexts (Opfer & Pedder, 2011).
III Teacher education in China
Indeed, ‘in teacher education, context is everything’ (Freeman, 2002, p. 11). Classrooms, schools and the larger social, cultural and educational contexts mediate and transform the what and how of teacher learning, teacher cognition, and teacher education. Or, as Sykes, Bird, and Kennedy (2010) put it, ‘the situations of practice that teachers find themselves in play a large role in producing their competence’ (p. 468). China’s unique EFL environment situates the training and development of Chinese EFL teachers. Even the sheer number of English language learners and teachers in China means Herculean challenges to the teacher education system, not to mention other obstacles that come with the differences in cultural, educational, and linguistic traditions between China and the West.
Teacher education is seen as strategically important by the Chinese government (MOE China, 2010b). Besides regular teacher training programmes at the tertiary level that cater to most of the pre-service teacher training, in-service teacher development programmes abound at national, regional, and institutional levels. One of the most prominent efforts in recent years is the ‘National School Teacher Development Plan’ that received an initial ¥550 million (approximately US$90 million or £57 million) from MOE and the Ministry of Finance in 2010 and benefited 1.15 million in-service teachers (MOE China, 2011a). Another notable effort is the recent establishment of professional standards for teachers at kindergarten, primary, and secondary levels (MOE China, 2011b).
Research on EFL teacher education in China is a rapidly expanding area of applied linguistics as well. In a review of research published in nine Chinese ELT journals between 2001 and 2005 (Li, Lam, & Gu, 2008), only 10 articles on teacher education were selected for review, and most of these studies were exploratory and focused on descriptive surveys of teacher background, teacher beliefs and practices. After 2005, the field was becoming more and more vibrant, however, when the first National Symposium on Foreign Language Teacher Education and Development was held. This bi-annual conference has since been held five times by 2013, and has inspired and propagated teacher education research across China.
Teams of dedicated researchers are currently engaged in teacher education research across China. For example, researchers at Beijing Foreign Studies University have focused on exploring the knowledge base and potential models for Chinese EFL teacher education and, more recently, on investigating China’s EFL teacher development tradition, especially at the tertiary level. A group of researchers at Beijing Normal University is exploring teacher education programme development for both initial pre-service teacher training and in-service school teacher learning. A joint team at Zhejiang University and Zhejiang Normal University are exploring a model of teacher development through a teaching–learning community of practice. Researchers at Hainan Normal University have been engaged in a continued pre-service language teacher education curriculum reform and have brought in-service English teacher education to grass-root teachers in Hainan Province. At the same time, an increasing number of individual or team projects have yielded research outcomes concerning China’s EFL teachers’ beliefs and practices, teachers’ professional identity (as teacher, researcher, and/or institutional person), teacher learning (through community of practice, classroom teaching, classroom discourse analysis, and/or critical reflections), teachers’ personal theories, EFL teacher culture, just to name a few of the more recent foci. A notable regret, however, is that the vibrant research being conducted is mostly published in Chinese. Little is known about their findings outside of China.
One of the major purposes of this special issue, therefore, is to share with the world some of the most up-to-date EFL teacher education research in China. In doing so, we necessarily share knowledge of China’s EFL educational environment, recent policy, and teachers’ concerns, in a context largely featured by notable uneven development in education in general. Given the strategic importance of language teacher education in the globalized world, we also hope that the special issue will mark a step forward for more researchers from China to join the international language teacher education researcher community.
IV This special issue
This special issue includes six empirical studies focusing on in-service teacher education at both basic education and tertiary levels in China. The topics range from teacher development, teacher cognition, teaching practices, teacher research, to curriculum implementation. Against the background of the government’s policy to promote equity in education, Gao and Xu traced the professional experiences of a group of EFL teachers from rural secondary schools in hinterland China and found that the discrepancies among these teachers’ representations of ‘actual’, ‘ought’ and ‘ideal’ selves constituted the driving forces in the professional development and career pursuit of these teachers. The fact that when professionally more ready most of the teachers chose to leave the hinterland regions where they were badly needed led the authors to a discussion of implications of the study in addressing the pressing needs of such regions. Kang and Cheng charted a novice secondary school teacher’s professional development over two years and outlined the ‘what’, ‘how’, and ‘why’ of novice teacher learning, highlighting the understanding that teacher cognition development involves a process of cyclical interaction between the teacher’s knowledge and belief system and his or her classroom practices. Adopting a mixed-method design, Zhang and Liu examined junior secondary school English teachers’ beliefs in language teaching and learning during the nationwide curriculum reform in the new century and contextual factors influencing their beliefs. The examination resulted in the claim that constructive and Confucian beliefs coexisted, and contextual factors such as constructivism the curriculum espouses, Confucian culture, and high-stakes testing exerted a strong impact on the teachers’ beliefs. Zheng and Borg investigated three senior secondary school teachers’ implementation and understanding of task-based learning and teaching as promoted in the 2003 curriculum. The investigation suggests that teachers’ responses to curriculum innovation do not seem to be straightforward, and that ingenious, continuous teacher education efforts are called for to achieve effective curriculum implementation. Acting on the belief that research is an ideal way leading to teacher autonomy, Wang and Zhang initiated and investigated an 18-month collaborative action research project between a group of university researchers and secondary school English teachers, with a view to uncovering the processes of learning to do research and the impact of such learning on the participating teachers. Important issues arising from the collaboration are discussed and conditions for successful collaboration highlighted. Against a background of transition from teaching only to teaching plus researching for university teachers, Xu explored university EFL teachers’ research practices and their identity construction as researchers. The study indicates that while increased research engagement was a reality, attitudes towards research varied and the teachers’ identity as researcher was found unsteady and at times fragmented.
Despite space limitations, we hope that this special issue represents the beginning of a Chinese voice in the field of EFL teacher education, and that this voice will become more and more confident. The confidence will hopefully be reflected in the agency and autonomy in purposeful, systematic, and conceptualized agenda setting for research. We envisage a day when Chinese EFL teacher education research is primarily aimed at solving ‘glocalized’ problems, for the improvement of teaching, learning, and teacher professional development. We therefore concur with Schalock, Schalock, and Ayres (2006) that teacher education research should aim for more explicit usefulness in policy and practice. We hope that in addition to academic quality, social and educational responsibility and responsiveness as well as usefulness will become the major criteria against which we evaluate our research and orientate our scholarly goals. With tasks today more demanding than ever before (Darling-Hammond, 2006), and with China’s colossal scope of teacher education needs, Grossman, Hammerness, and McDonald’s (2009) words help remind us to leave pomposity and bookish cerebration behind: If teaching is indeed a complex practice, and not something that individuals will naturally develop on their own, then teacher educators must develop new approaches for preparing ordinary people, in an extraordinarily brief amount of time, to be prepared for the challenge. (p. 287)
Clearly, with this special issue of LTR, we have only walked a small step towards this direction.