Foreign Ways, Chinese Meanings: Impact of Western-Based Education on Chinese English Language Teachers

• In Event: 70.040 - Global Impact, Local Trends: Glocality in the Lives of Teachers

Abstract

The present study focuses on Chinese English Language teachers (ELT) and the impact of Western training and teacher education on their pedagogy and practices, in particular, the impact of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) on the Chinese ELTs’ teaching. The study’s importance is twofold: First, Chinese teachers’ perceptions of the approach and its effectiveness provide a window onto China’s evolving educational priorities. Second, the disjuncture between teacher professional development programs and teaching practices is of major concern in the field. Even in the US, a large body of research has found substantial gaps between theory and practice, the ideal and the real. How much more challenging, then, might the “translation” of Western-based teaching concepts into pedagogies in non-Western settings be?

Author

• Faridah Pawan, Indiana University