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Chinese ELT Context and EFL Teachers

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Teacher Beliefs as a Complex System: English Language Teachers in China

Part of the book series: English Language Education ((ELED,volume 4))

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Abstract

This chapter situates the study of teacher belief in the National English Curriculum Reform launched in the early twenty-first century in China. The chapter first reviews the socio-economic development in China that initiates new requirements for teacher education. Such educational reform promotes paradigm shifts from a traditional knowledge-based mode of teaching to a more competence-based mode of teaching. Curriculum change, however, does not guarantee equivalent changes in teachers’ beliefs and practice, which poses a dilemma for the Chinese teachers. Moreover, together with the introduction to the current insufficient professional support for EFL teachers in China, the chapter foregrounds the importance and necessity of an investigation of EFL teachers’ belief systems so as to inform teachers how to reconstruct their knowledge and skill bases and to reconceptualise their roles and responsibilities in their professional lives in the context of educational reform.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In China, most primary schools start teaching English from Grade One, while some primary schools in rural areas set up English courses from Grade Three. In some universities, students can be exempted from learning English if they pass Band Four Examinations for non-English majors after the first 1 or 2 years’ learning.

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  1. School of Foreign Languages, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, Sichuan Province, P.R. China

    Hongying Zheng

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Zheng, H. (2015). Chinese ELT Context and EFL Teachers. In: Teacher Beliefs as a Complex System: English Language Teachers in China. English Language Education, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23009-2_3

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