Teacher Development in the Current Study

The foregoing section has offered an operational definition of teacher

development grounded in Socio-Cultural Theory/Cultural-Historical Activity Theory and highlighted the potential of collaborative approaches as especially powerful means of fostering development. Although not widely implemented in Chinese contexts, such methods have apparently met with some success there. The literature surveyed here provides a rationale for further investigation of teacher-development practice in the target research setting.

1.3 GTI and Teacher Development in Western China: A Warrant for the Dissertation Study

Lin, Wang, Akamatsu, and Riazi (2005) noted over ten years ago that

“mainstream TESOL methodologies are still mainly informed by studies and experiences situated in Anglo-societies such as the United States, Canada, Australia, or Britain.” They continue:

This Anglo-centric knowledge base constitutes the canons of the discipline and often gets exported to periphery countries as pedagogical expertise to be followed by local education workers. (p. 210, emphasis added)

Although this state of affairs is changing for the better, my review of the

literature, in particular of the challenges to implementing TBLT under conditions in Asia, indicated that Lin et al.’s (2005) assessment still holds in China; Chinese “education workers” are now being held to standards (i.e., for implementing task-based teaching) devised in “Anglo-centric” contexts, with inconsistent results (cf. also Van den Branden, 2016). As the following chapter explains, my dissertation study asks how these

pedagogical “exports” fare in a more remote part of China, and how, given perceptions of these and other pedagogical recommendations, teachers may more effectively be

supported.

For me, as for Lin et al. (2005), this inquiry must not be a “single-minded pursuit of the most effective technology of teaching English” without attention to “issues of agency, identity, creative appropriation, and resistance of local social actors when they are confronted with the task of learning English in their specific local contexts” (p. 217). In posing the research questions stated below, my concern above all is that my

participants have a forum for talking back to the influential discourses of our field, supporting and/or challenging its consensus and expanding its relevance in a diverse global community.

2 METHODOLOGY

Under the rubric of an inductive organizational case study (Mantere & Ketokivi, 2013), this study relied on ethnographic methods, the development of insider categories of focal phenomena through observation and member checking (Duff, 2008; Gobo, 2011), using journaling (Casanave, 2011), interviewing (Spradley, 1979; cf. Johnson, 2009; Tasker, Johnson, & Davis, 2010), and document analysis, but depending most vitally on the researcher’s presence within the research site (Gobo, 2011). Below I justify my use of these methodologies.

The researcher’s presence within the site of research allows her insights that can move past superficial accounts into participant observation, i.e. “direct relationship with the social actors … in their natural environment” in order to “observ[e] and describ[e] their social actions” (Gobo, 2011, p. 17). The participant-observer is able to “interact … and participate in [the social actors’] everyday ceremonials and rituals[,] learning their code (or at least parts of it) in order to understand the meaning of their actions” (p. 26). Gobo (2011) argues for the heightened value of observation methodologies at a moment in which an “opinion society” has given way to an observation society, and reliance on self-report to reliance on data such as video (Gobo, 2011, pp. 25-26). That said, in an interactionist tradition (Schwandt, 2000) which privileges insider understandings through close contact and naturalistic inquiry, self-report data including interview and

questionnaire data are still crucial. These data allow the researcher to acquire the

language insiders use to make sense of their environments, and to present data findings as far as possible in insiders’ own words.

From a sensitivity to the self as researcher “and the way in which the researcher’s positioning impacts on the research process” (Gobo, 2011, p. 22), participant observers develop a reflexive orientation. At its core, this stance is an acknowledgement that researcher comes to the research as a human agent with a personal history, worldview, and set of abilities and limitations that shape the findings (cf. Duff, 2008; Holliday, 2010). To present an account of the self as researcher is to undergird the credibility of the endeavor (Hammersley, 2008) and provide the users of the research product insights that can allow them to weigh findings in light of researcher agency. Further undergirding credibility and trustworthiness in research are commitments to “transparency of method” and “submission” to the data such that “the unexpected is allowed to emerge and perhaps change the direction of the research” (Holliday, 2010, pp. 100-101).

Under the broad rubric of ethnographic participant engagement, the current study is conceptualized as a case study of an English program in a Chinese context, with teachers’ development with respect to genre/task-based instruction at the center of analytic focus, and contextual factors impacting on this main focal phenomenon (cf. Duff, 2008; Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014). The study aims for an in-depth description of the target English program through the use of multiple data collection procedures over the course of one year, with formal procedures conducted over one semester. To justify my focus on genre/task approaches, I refer to the fact that curricular documents issued by the Chinese Ministry of Education allow for the use of genre approaches at all levels and advocate explicitly a task-based approach to English language teaching at the secondary level (Hoagland, Barron Serrano, & Geng, in preparation; Adams & Newton, 2009); other research has indicated the value of task-

based approaches at college levels as well (Song, Yang, & Lei, 2006). This chapter describes the research context, instruments, participants, data collection procedures, and approaches to data analysis.