2018 Annual Conference of China English Language Education Association (CELEA2018)

207 / 2018-07-11 16:48:39

Mediating EFL Teacher Learning: A Case Study of the BOT Program

language teacher cognition; teacher learning; sociocultural theory; the BOT Program

Plenary track > 中国特色英语教师发展研究

Teacher cognition, which probes into how teachers learn to teach and how they carry out their work, has helped to ―capture the complexities of who teachers are, what they know and believe, how they learn to teach, and how they carry out their work in diverse contexts throughout their careers‖ (Johnson, 2009, p.9-10). Among the many research interests in teacher cognition, research on teacher learning began to emerge in the 1980s, and it has remained the central topic in the study of teacher cognition since the 1990s. Influenced by the sociocultural theory, which was proposed by Russian psychologist Vygotsky (1978), teacher learning is conceptualized as normative and lifelong, emerging out of and through experiences in social contexts (Freeman & Johnson, 1998). In this sense, sociocultural theory shifts the focus of EFL teacher education in the way that it emphasizes teachers as learners of EFL teaching and highlights the socially situated nature of teacher leaning and exemplified the cognitive and social processes that teachers go through as learn to teach. Thus, understanding EFL teacher learning is vital for improving teacher education programs and supporting the professional development of EFL teachers.
The current study is attempted to address three questions: has EFL teacher learning happened in one of the best teacher education programs in China – the BOT Program? How was EFL teacher learning mediated by the BOT Program? And how was the teachers’ knowledge base reconstructed in the process? A qualitative approach is adopted by the current study. Interviews and reflective dairies were employed as the ways of data collection. Altogether 18 teachers were invited to be the participants of the current study and three of them agreed to do regular interviews with the author. All the qualitative data was coded and analyzed by NVivo 11 pro. Implications are drawn for enhancing our understanding of the process of EFL teacher learning and the development of future teacher education programs.