Chinese Self, Australian Other: Chinese as a Foreign Language Teacher Identity Construction in Australian Contexts.

Yu Han,Xiaoyan Ji

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.792004

Abstract

Research in the field of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) education has been increasing in the past decades. However, the number of studies on CFL teacher identity is limited. To bridge the gap, this study employed a qualitative method to explore Chinese CFL teachers’ identity formation and reformation in Australian contexts. A Chinese-Australian language program was studied to examine the challenges, struggles and developments of Chinese CFL teachers who came to Australia to pursue professional growth. Five Master’s theses and three interview participants were included to paint a picture of how Chinese CFL teachers interact internally and externally with a new environment. Guided by Mead’s theory of self and other, we found that Chinese CFL teachers’ identity formation and reformation in Australian classrooms are deeply influenced by their self-identification and their integration with others in the community. Cultural connectedness is a key for organizational attitudes in the relationship of self and other. Chinese CFL teachers were found lacking the wholeness of self in Australian contexts, which led to obstacles in teacher identity construction. Insufficient communication between self and other resulted in their positioning crisis.

Highlights

Internationalization in education has brought an increase in global teacher mobility (Sun, 2012)
As a start of the program, the graduates, who predominantly majored in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language and English as a Foreign Language, need to take up International English Language Test System (IELTS), designed by the University of Cambridge and measures a person’s ability to listen, speak, read, and write English at the level that is necessary to go to universities mainly in Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand where English is the native language, to ensure a reasonable English proficiency
Based on categorizations and connections of data, the findings of this study were structured into three sections to display the meaning of self-other relationship to Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) teachers in Australian classrooms, variant factors that contribute to different identities, and implications as well as results of different approaches

Summary

Introduction

Internationalization in education has brought an increase in global teacher mobility (Sun, 2012). Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) education is one of the key sectors following the trend due to the growing demand for Chinese language education (Wang et al, 2013). There is a high demand for CFL teachers to satisfy the need. Chinese native speakers are the main teacher force to satisfy the need. Moving across cultures with divergent educational systems, CFL teachers face new problems and issues, which offer chances for shaping them to become international language teachers. Professional identities and beliefs of foreign language teachers have been studied much in general, but not much attention has been paid to Chinese language teacher identity entering into Western educational contexts (Gao, 2010; Wang and Du, 2014). CFL teachers’ professional identity issue is one of the key fields under-researched

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion