Chinese ELT Context and EFL Teachers

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.