Drawing on insights from Communities of Practice and critical discourse theory, this study investigates how teacher identities are discursively constructed in course of teacher education and under the influence of social structure. The participants were seven Hong Kong and nine mainland Chinese pre-service teachers. Two focus group interviews and…

This article reports on an inquiry into a group of English language teachers' professional experiences that interpreted their motivation to teach and their shifting professional commitment with reference to representations and visions that they had and did not have about themselves in rural secondary schools in China's hinterland regions. It…

This study examines the beliefs of Chinese junior high school English teachers about foreign language teaching and influencing contextual factors in a time when curriculum innovation is confronting deep-rooted cultural traditions and complex teaching realities. Drawing upon data collected by means of questionnaires and interviews, this study…

This article reports on a narrative study of university EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers' research practices and their identity construction as researchers in China. Drawing upon data from narrative frames among 104 teachers and in-depth interviews with four teachers, the study reveals that teachers' increased research engagement, as…

This ethnographic study attempts to find, reveal and understand the learning possibilities, from the social learning perspective, in the process of peer feedback activity in a College English classroom for non-English majors in China. The study reveals the nature of Exploratory Practice (EP), and the investigation is guided by EP principles,…

This article reports a study of aspects of pedagogy that can bring about students' cognitive engagement with academic content and, thus, use of the academic language in content-based language lessons in three middle schools in Xi'an, China. Two criteria--academic content level and depth of processing--were used to determine cognitive content…

This article presents findings from what we believe to be the first large-scale study of its kind on the use of ICT (information and communications technology) in English language classes in China. Participants are 400 EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers from different types of schools in Beijing. The purpose of the study was to examine…