Research engagement and educational decentralisation: problematising primary school English teachers’ research experiences in China

Abstract

Teachers are encouraged to enhance professional competence through reflective practice and they are also asked to undertake research to generate evidence for their professional practices. This paper reports on an inquiry into a group of primary school English language teachers' research engagement in the province of Guangdong on the Chinese mainland. The inquiry explored the effect of educational reforms on the participants' research engagement through the use of an open-ended questionnaire and group interviews. The inquiry revealed that research engagement had become an important part of the teachers' professional lives. Emerging findings from the inquiry also problematised their research engagement as it was found to have been undermined by a competitive promotion mechanism, the teachers' conceptualisations of research and challenges in the knowledge dissemination process. The paper ends with reflections on how to make teacher research "educational" for teachers and serve as an effective way for professional development.

How does writing for publication help professional development of teachers? A case study in China

“…As Ma (1992) stated, even though the research community in China is far from comprehensive, teachers' writing has more chance to be published than in the United States and elsewhere. Further, excellent teachers are generally keen to have a publication record (Sargent and Hannum 2009;Gao et al 2010Gao et al , 2011. As a result, teachers in China are likely to have a more central role to play in educational research than is the case in their counterpart countries.…”

Participation in Teacher Research at a Tertiary Institution in Cambodia

“…Teacher research in language teaching emerged in the 1980s (Burns & Burton, 2008) and has attracted great attention from applied linguists, researchers, and scholars. Recently, various studies have examined teacher research in language teaching: in a global context (Borg, 2009(Borg, , 2013, in the United States (Freeman, 1998), Australia and New Zealand (Burns & Burton, 2008), China (Barkhuizen, 2009;Borg & Liu, 2013;Gao, Barkhuizen, & Chow, 2011), Vietnam (Pham, 2006), and Cambodia (Moore, 2011a(Moore, , 2011b. The discussion of teacher research generally focuses on the kind of collaborative inquiry involved (with other teachers and/or external collaborators), aims (Allwright, 2005;Borg, 2010Borg, , 2013Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999), quality of teacher research (Nunan, 1997), and conditions for sustaining teacher research (Allwright, 1997;Borg, 2006).…”

Career advancement or teacher development? Teachers’ perceptions of writing publications in China

“…Unlike the west, writing papers seems to be part of the duty especially for experienced teachers in China and is one of the important criteria of teacher promotion and school-based annual appraisal items. Studies reveal that teachers in China view writing up research as a challenging task (Gao et al, 2010(Gao et al, , 2011Sargent and Hannum, 2009;Sargent, 2009). School leaders and education officers encourage teachers to write as producing publications is viewed as a performance indicator of school quality (Sargent and Hannum, 2009;Zhang and Ng, 2011).…”