Volume 42, Issue 1

Following years of pre-service teacher education, novice teachers are often enthusiastic about embarking on the journey in the teaching profession. However, they may not always possess the internal capacity and institutional support to take effective control of their teaching. This paper reports on a case study of the teaching lives of two novice secondary school ESL (English as a second language) teachers in Hong Kong, drawing on qualitative data gathered through individual face-to-face interviews, and supplemented by email exchanges and telephone conversations, over a one-year period. The study investigates how novice English teachers develop their teacher autonomy, and what factors contribute to their development as autonomous English teachers. The paper concludes that novice English teachers in Hong Kong possess the capacity and are also ready for autonomy, and that an invitational, supportive and collaborative school environment plays a decisive role in affording ample opportunities for novices to develop their autonomy in language teaching. The study suggests that novice teachers should become critically aware of the affordances (opportunities, possibilities, invitations, enablements) in their working conditions, and should meanwhile exercise their teacher agency to act on these affordances to pursue their personal-professional development.

Previous studies on Chinese English teachers’ identity and autonomy have overlooked the group of female student-teachers (FSTs) from rural areas. Drawing on data from questionnaire responses, narrative frames and semi-structured interviews with research participants, this study first depicts the trajectories of identity construction and autonomy development of nine female student-teachers, and then identifies three main factors that affected their transformation from English learners to student English teachers, and the development of autonomy in such a process. The three factors are gendered ideology, affinity groups and family finance. This study concludes with some implications for policy makers and teacher educators on how to empower female student English teachers from rural China to transform from English learners to English teachers, and how to enhance their autonomy in such a transformation.

Employing one-to-one interviews, this study explores, from a poststructuralist view, how Chinese English Teachers (CETs) struggle to construct their professional identity within the dominant ideology and disempowering discourses of native-speakerism in a globalizing China. Twenty-five CETs were interviewed, and the results have shown that applying human agency and subjectivity, CET participants manage to counteract the disempowering discourses and reach a relatively balanced power relationship with their native speaker (NS) counterparts mainly through four ways: Othering the NSs; exploring their own unique strengths; taking special roles in ELT; and establishing their credibility through hard work. The Chinese culture of learning, specifically, Confucian values, also plays an important role in CETs’ professional identity construction.

Teacher identity formation provides a direction for the development of autonomy (Huang & Benson, 2013). However, the process of identity formation is complex and how this process influences teacher autonomy has not been sufficiently studied. To contribute to knowledge in this field, the present study investigated the relationship between teachers’ attitudes toward teacher identity and teacher autonomy. We first observed 14 Chinese College English teachers’ classroom teaching. Following that, we conducted stimulated recall interviews with all the teachers to pinpoint their autonomous practices. Finally, we conducted semi-structured interviews to investigate these teachers’ attitudes toward their identities. One of the main findings was that the teachers who held a positive attitude toward their professional identity were more autonomous in their teaching practices than those with a negative attitude. The findings invite us to conclude that teachers’ attitudes toward their professional identity are positively associated with teacher autonomy.

This study aims to explore the relationship among autonomous learning ability, learning burnout and English grades by structural equation modeling. The survey of 481 non-English majors showed that autonomous learning ability, learning burnout and English grades correlated significantly with each other, and the structural equation model of the three variables was stable. This suggests that the stronger the autonomous learning ability, the lower the level of learning burnout, the higher the English grades. This empirical study shows that the autonomous learning ability of non-English majors can influence the level of learning burnout, which in turn influences English grades. Learning burnout can mediate the effects of autonomous learning ability on English grades.

This paper systematically reviews factors related to the use of reading strategies among college-level learners of English as a foreign/second language (EFL/ESL). The author examines empirical studies published from 2000 to 2017 in order to answer two research questions: (a) What factors relate to the college-level EFL/ESL learners’ use of reading strategies? (b) How do these factors relate to college-level EFL/ESL learners’ use of reading strategies? An initial review of the literature identifies four factors related to EFL/ESL learners’ reading strategy use: English proficiency, first language (L1) literacy experience, gender, and motivation. For reasons of space, this article only reports and discusses findings on the first two factors. (1) English proficiency: High-proficiency readers use more metacognitive, support, global, and problem-solving strategies and have more metacognitive knowledge of strategy use than low-proficiency readers. They also differ from low-proficiency readers in learning reading strategies. (2) L1 literacy experience: EFL/ESL readers’ L1 linguistic features and L1 reading experience shape their strategy use when they read English.

Research on English as a lingua franca (ELF) has triggered a debate on whether English teaching should consistently conform to native-speaker Standard English or it should value the pedagogical implications of ELF. This article provides an overview of current research on teaching English as a lingua franca. It starts with research on the rationale to introduce ELF-informed teaching and comparisons between ELF-informed teaching and native-English-based teaching. Concrete proposals of how to incorporate ELF-informed teaching into English language teaching (ELT) classrooms are presented. Then controversies in the debate are summarized. They are: A lack of ELF-informed textbooks; a lack of ELF-informed assessment; and a lack of qualified teachers. It then reviews recent publications dealing with these controversies. This is followed by a discussion about the research on ELF-informed teaching in the Chinese context. This article argues that research on the practicality of ELF-informed teaching should start with prospective English users, such as students in China’s Business English Program. It concludes with some suggestions for future research and practice on ELF-informed teaching in China.