In the following section I have investigated participant EFL teachers’ lived
experience of the current EFL curriculum reform as shown in their responses to the questionnaire on their experience of previous EFL curriculum reforms. Their
reflections have opened up my exploration of lived time in relation to this. As van Manen (1997) states:
Whatever I have encountered in my past now sticks to me as memories or as (near) forgotten experiences that somehow leave their traces on my being—the way I carry myself (hopeful or confident, defeated or worn-out), the gestures I have adopted and made my own (from mother, father, teacher, friend), the words I speak and the language that ties me to my past (family, school, ethnicity), and so forth…(p. 104).
He suggests that an exploration of the past provides possibilities for exploring present and future life-worlds. I have drawn on his suggestion to inform my explorations of the past experience of participant EFL teachers, which has helped me to go a step further to explore their present experience of the reform under study as it relates to the theme of lived time. Crookes (1997) argues that past experience influences the ways of teaching, forming a major part of professional experience. In considering these perspectives, I have examined participants’ past experience through their responses to the questionnaire to examine their lived time in relation to their lived experience.
When participant EFL teachers reflect on their time as secondary school students, the majority say that English teaching at the time was mainly teacher-centred and grammar-focused. They describe their EFL teachers as being the major speakers in class and as students, they had few opportunities to speak at all, let alone in the new language of English that they were learning. They say that they found that EFL teachers mainly explained or practised grammar rules, seldom designing activities for students to communicate with each other in class. Participants also say that they seldom had listening tests during their time as secondary school students. A recurrent note within the data is that they, as students, enjoyed taking notes in class as they were not often required to speak, and while they sometimes did have opportunities to answer questions, their EFL teachers often corrected their errors in front of the class. Such teaching practices tended to make students fear the prospect of communicating with others in English, even with the other students during or after class. Apart from these features of their education in EFL, the participants consider that their English teachers had limited English proficiency themselves.
This was further indicated by their EFL teachers’ instructional classroom language, being mostly in Chinese, rather than in English. This was more obvious in Site A than Site B (see Figure 14 and Figure 15).
Figure 14: Instructional language (Site A) Figure 15: Instructional language (Site B)
When participants recall their time of being secondary school students, almost half of them express an appreciation of teacher-centred and grammar-focused teaching, and nearly one third of them state that they still liked those traditional teaching methods. More than half the participants across the two sites say that they were afraid of their teachers and seldom had any contact with them, particularly those in Site A (this is detailed in Figure 16 and Figure 17). Questionnaire data also show that more than one quarter of EFL teachers across both sites complain that they had no extra learning materials outside of the textbooks used, those in Site A in
particular (see Figure 18 and Figure 19).
Figure 16: Feelings about teachers （（（（Site A）））） Figure 17: Feelings about teachers (Site B)
Strongly agree Agree Slightly agree Slightly disagree Disagree Strongly disagree Strongly agree Agree Slightly agree Slightly disagree Disagree Strongly disagree 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Str ongl y agr ee Agr ee Sl i ghtl y agr ee Sl i ghtl y di sagr ee Di sagr ee Str ongl y di sagr ee 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 St r ongly agree Agree Slight ly agr ee Slight ly disagr ee Disagr ee St r ongly disagr ee
Figure 18: Extra learning materials (Site A)
Figure 19: Extra learning materials (Site B)
Questionnaire data provide a general picture of participant EFL teachers’
experience of previous EFL curriculum reforms through their reflections of being secondary school students themselves. The picture shows teacher-centred and grammar translation teaching methods dominating EFL teaching and learning in previous curriculum reforms. EFL teachers dominated the classroom while students were regarded as receptive vessels rather than participants in their own teaching and learning; they lacked opportunities for oral or listening practice in English in class, so that they found it difficult to communicate with others when learning English in secondary schools. Apart from this, they consider that their EFL teachers’ limited English proficiency influenced their EFL learning and that dull and outdated teaching content resulted in them having a diminished interest in learning English.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Strongly agree Agree Slightly agree Slightly disagree Disagree Strongly disagree 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 Strongly agree Agree Slightly agree Slightly disagree Disagree Strongly disagree
This is a particularly interesting point considering that they became English teachers themselves.
An exploration of participant EFL teachers’ past experience as part of lived time indicates that they experienced shortcomings of previous reforms regarding EFL teaching and learning in relation to that lived experience. Teacher-centred methods focus on explaining grammar rules, conducting grammar practice and revision of these, giving prominence to the role in the classroom to the teachers, in the process constructing students as passive listeners. The emphasis is on language learning as learning grammar more than social interaction or learners’ participation in the target language, marginalising notions of comprehensive language competence as the final goal of language learning. Such teaching methods are not designed to have students achieve the specified competence that has been identified in the new EFL curriculum as enabling them to cope with the demands on Chinese society that is associated with rapid economic development. Generated out of the education contexts of the time before the current EFL curriculum reform, the teaching and learning approaches used are not consistent with considerations of Vygotskian sociocultural perspectives in relation to language learning, which I have discussed in Chapter 3. They are inappropriate when one considers the goals of the current EFL curriculum reform with its focus on students’ comprehensive language competence, as this is the very thing that they ignore. They fail to position students as the centre of EFL teaching and learning, inhibiting student development in EFL competence. The data suggest that previous EFL curriculum reforms experienced by participating EFL teachers have been identified by these teachers as having been deficient. They have come to this conclusion through their present experience of alternative methods and approaches to language teaching and learning that are characteristic of the present reform, as ‘the past changes under the pressures and influences of the present’ (van Manen, 1990, p. 104). These teachers’ past
experience has formed the basis for exploring their present experience, as discussed in the following section.