A Community Of Practice And Its Influence On Vietnamese Efl Teachers' Professional Identities

Abstract

<p><b>This thesis investigates the community of practice (CoP) as a model for professional development for EFL teachers in Vietnam as well as its influences on their professional identities and practices. In the context of Vietnam, although EFL teachers, English language teaching, and professional development (PD) for EFL teachers have been the focus of the national education reforms, and funds and effort are put into PD activities aiming at improving EFL teachers’ language proficiency and updating their teaching methodologies, there has been little evidence of positive changes in teachers' teaching practices and students' learning outcomes. Several collaborative models for teacher professional development which have recently been introduced, despite being helpful, still raise some issues regarding voluntary participation, distributed leadership, trust and collegiality, and the balance between top-down (PD provided and required by an institution or regulatory body) and bottom-up (PD directed and determined by individual and groups of teachers) approaches. The international literature also reveals that effective collaborative communities for teachers are rare and while collaborative models are common in primary and secondary schools, they are limited in higher education. In this thesis, a community of practice (CoP), defined as a group of people “who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis” (Wenger et al., 2002, p. 4), was introduced as a form of professional development in the context of university EFL teaching in Vietnam. </b></p> <p>This thesis draws on social constructionism and social constructivism as theoretical frameworks for understanding teacher professional identity and the professional learning process within the CoP. A qualitative case study as the research method and action research as the research process were adopted to investigate the complex situations and meanings of the CoP process and teacher professional identity. Eight EFL teachers (including me as the participant) were recruited to participate in the CoP over six months. Multiple instruments including pre-interviews, post- interviews, CoP recordings, reflective writing journals, and artefacts were used to collect data, and discourse analysis was adopted to analyse and interpret the data. </p> <p>Evidence from the data highlights that multiple discourses relating to teaching experience, English language proficiency, Confucian and constructivist teaching approaches, and institutional factors influenced Vietnamese EFL teachers’ professional identities and practices. Conflicting discourses led to tensions in the teachers’ professional identities and negatively influenced their teaching practices. The structure of the CoP, which was characterised by being voluntary, having clear ground rules, a shared repertoire, and no leaders’ involvement offered a safe place for the teachers to collaborate and mutually engage with each other through a variety of activities. The thesis demonstrates that when teachers feel safe, experience agency as well as distributed power in their own professional development, they are able to share their teaching problems honestly. With appropriate scaffolding from More Knowledgeable Others (MKOs), they are able to challenge taken-for-granted knowledge and reconcile conflicts in discourses, thereby transforming their professional identities and practices in a positive way. The CoP elements of mutual engagement, shared repertoire, and joint enterprise were evident in this research, embedded within three key features - Connection, Collaboration, and Reflection. These features made the CoP model used here different from other collaborative models in Vietnam and eliminated some issues of such models, such as a lack of trust, a lack of voluntary participation, and the balance between top-down and bottom-up approaches. The thesis makes significant contributions to knowledge about collaborative PD models for EFL teachers and teacher professional identities in Vietnam. Recommendations are made, which aim to strengthen the basis for collaborative PD amongst Vietnamese teachers and suggest a CoP model appropriate to the Vietnamese context and other similar contexts.</p>