Of the 42 participants, 37 are female; five are male. Seventeen participants of the 42 in my research project have at least 15 years of teaching experience and sixteen of these accepted the invitation to be interviewed. The majority of participants learned English either before or while in junior secondary school, and all of them learned
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English in China. Eight of the 42 participants have had experience of traveling overseas, and all of these are from Site B. The data show the differences between participants’ backgrounds in the two sites. In relation to age range, there are more participants between the ages of 20 and 34 years old in Site B than in Site A, so that the ages of the participants in Site B are younger than those of participants in Site A (see Figure 3 and Figure 7). Participants in both sites are mostly aged between 35 and 55 years old (see Figure 12).
Bachelaor degree or over
Teaching certificant or diploma
Figure 12: Age range Figure 13: Level of degree
Questionnaire data also show more than half of participants have only a two or three years Teaching Certificate. Less than half of the participants have a four-year Bachelors degree (see Figure 13). Two of the participants in my research have a Masters Degree. Questionnaire data further show the differences in relation to teachers’ levels of academic degrees (see Figure 6, compared with Figure 10). One of the participants in Site A holds a four-year Bachelors degree, while nineteen in Site B have a Bachelors degree. The data indicate that participant EFL teachers’ degree levels are lower than the average of those in China in general, where, according to Wang (2004), fifty-five percent of teachers in secondary schools have a Bachelors degree. In Site A, that is, in the less developed regions where I
conducted my research, this level is even lower, where only five percent of EFL teachers have a Bachelors degree (see Figure 6 re Site A).
A two or three years EFL teacher education program is arguably insufficient to deal with the range of knowledge required because of the relatively short length of time of study. As Hu (2005c) states, two or three years teachers college can only provide
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a small size of education courses and/ or school-based professional experience, and it is doubtful that such courses have the capacity to give the sort of attention to relevant knowledge and skills for a comprehensive pre-service teacher education. This has further implications for understanding and implementing the reform. As Shulman (2007) suggests:
Teacher preparation for reform efforts requires at least five years of higher education (because there is too much to learn) to be adequately equipped to organize elaborate programs of new-teacher induction and mentoring as the most important learning and socialization occurs predominately in the workplace (p.127).
China has its own system of teacher preparation. Normal schools, teachers colleges and normal universities were the three major providers of programs for teacher preparation in China between the 1970s and the 1990s (Hu, 2005c). According to Hu (2005b), normal schools, as specialized secondary schools, provide three or four years of teacher education programs for preparation of primary school or
kindergarten teachers. These schools cater for either junior or secondary school graduates. Teachers colleges, as part of the tertiary sector in China, offer two or three years of programs for preparation of junior secondary school teachers, taking in senior secondary graduates. Normal Universities provide four year programs of pre-service teacher education programs delivered to senior secondary graduates. The pre-service teacher education programs in normal schools and teachers colleges lead to teaching certificates while those in Normal Universities lead to a Bachelors degree. Of the participants in my research, more than half of the EFL teachers hold teaching certificates, representing more than half of the EFL teaching force in these schools, those in Site A in particular.
In both sites the majority of participants are female, but the issue of gender in my research has little influence on their perspectives in the course of my data analysis, and this is consistent with the research literature that also suggests little gender differences evident in teachers’ perspectives (Li, 1999). I have also accepted four participants who have less than 15 years of teaching experience for interviews because of their availability, as discussed in Chapter 5. I have found similarities
between this group of younger teachers and that group of older teachers who meet the criteria of selection for the interviewees, so that the differences that one might have expected between the two age groups has not been evident in interview data. Questionnaire data show that half of participants in Site B have experience of traveling overseas, compared with none in Site A, suggesting that Site B
participants have had more opportunities to be exposed to the sorts of intercultural experience in foreign countries that may enhance their professional development. As Camenson (2007) argues, EFL teachers need to have experience of traveling or living in cultural settings other than their own as these sorts of experiences
contribute to successful careers as language teachers. Participant EFL teacher backgrounds as identified from the questionnaire data have provided a basis for the selection of suitable participants to invite for in-depth interviews.
Lived time
Phenomenological considerations of time do not look upon time as a measurable object, but identify temporality as one of the subjective aspects of the life-world (Rie Konno Rn, 2008). van Manen’s (1990) concept of temporality, which he calls lived time, is ‘subjective time as opposed to clock or objective time’ (p. 104), which I have discussed in Chapter 4. This time cannot be measured, but can be
experienced, developing a sense of continuity and identity, or otherwise (Brough, 2001). I have explored lived time as a feature of participant EFL teachers’ lived experience. According to van Manen (1990), lived time may be considered as ‘our temporal way of being in the world’ and ‘the temporal dimensions of past, present, and future constitute the horizons of a person’s temporal landscape’ (p. 104). I have taken up such considerations in this chapter to explore participant EFL teachers’ past and present experience emerging as these emerge in their responses to the questionnaire. The past experience explored here is participant teachers’ own experience of being a secondary school student during previous curriculum reforms, mainly between the 1970s and 1990s, given their age ranges. Some participant teachers were students themselves in the 1970s, when the country had just been through what has been dubbed The Cultural Revolution, and all that that entailed for students at the time. I have dealt with this in Chapter 2 in my review of the literature.
Participant teachers who were students in the 1980s experienced the ramifications of reforms of new policies that had opened China to the world, also detailed in Chapter 2. Other participant teachers experienced the specifically EFL focused curriculum reforms of 1993 as professional in the field.
In each of these cases, changes in EFL teaching and learning had identifiable common shortcomings, especially in comparison with the new EFL curriculum currently being implemented. On the basis of that commonality, I have considered previous reforms as a whole when analyzing participant EFL teachers’ past
experience, as there was more in common than was in contention. Considering the theme of lived time in relation to an overview of EFL teachers’ experience, I have included an examination of participant EFL teachers’ present experience of the reform under study with their views of ECS and the new EFL curriculum. This also includes their views of relevant teaching methods, content and assessment associate with the new EFL curriculum. This has enabled me to capture the views of
participant EFL teachers as these relate to their lived experience, at the same time exploring ways in which these teachers’ lived experience has played out in their implementing of the reform. As Benner (1994) says:
The experience of lived time…is the way one projects oneself into the future and understands oneself from the past. Temporality is more than a linear succession of moments. It includes the qualitative, lived experience of time or timelessness (p. 105).
I have drawn on this concept to explore lived time as stemming from the past, and which provides the basis for exploring the present and the future. This has guided me to explore the participant EFL teachers’ lived experience from their past experience, as detailed below.