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A Critical Ethnography of ‘Westerners’ Teaching English in China

Tens of thousands of Western ‘teachers’, many of whom would not be considered teachers elsewhere, are employed to teach English in public and private education in China. Little has previously been known, except anecdotally, about their experiences, about the effect they have on education in the context, or on students’ perceptions of ‘the West’ that result from this contact. This book is an ethnographic study of Westerners’ lived experiences teaching English in Shanghai, China. It is based on three years of groundbreaking research into the pre-service training, classroom practices, personal identities and motives, and local socially constructed roles of a group of ‘backpacker teachers’ from the UK, the USA and Canada. It is a study that goes beyond the classroom, addressing broader questions about the sociology, and politics, of transnational education and China’s evolving relationship with the outside world.

Phiona Stanley is a lecturer at the School of Education, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of New South Wales. She holds Politics and Education Masters degrees and a PhD in Education. She has taught in six countries including China, and has trained teachers on Cambridge CELTA and MEd at various Australian universities including offshore courses in China.

Routledge Critical Studies in Asian EducationSeries Editors: S. Gopinathan and David Hogan

Primary School English-Language Education in AsiaFrom Policy to PracticeEdited by Bernard Spolsky and Young-in Moon

A Critical Ethnography of ‘Westerners’ Teaching English in ChinaShanghaied in ShanghaiPhiona Stanley

A Critical Ethnography of ‘Westerners’ Teaching English in ChinaShanghaied in Shanghai

Phiona Stanley

First published 2013by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2013 Phiona Stanley

The right of Phiona Stanley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataStanley, Phiona.A critical ethnography of “Westerners” teaching English in China : Shanghaied in Shanghai / Phiona Stanley.p. cm. -- (Routledge critical studies in Asian education)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-415-65622-1 (hbk) -- ISBN 978-0-203-07805-1 (ebk) 1. English language--Study and teaching--Chinese speakers. 2. English language--Study and teaching--China--Shanghai. 3. English teachers--China--Shanghai. I. Title. PE1130.C4S73 2013428.2'4951132--dc232012022729

ISBN: 978-0-415-65622-1 (hbk)ISBN: 978-0-20307-805-1 (ebk)

Typeset in Galliardby Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby

Contents

Illustrations ixAcknowledgements x

1 Introduction 1

Contextualizing the study 2Locating the study 4Defining the research focus 5Navigating the text 9Notes on terminology 10

2 English teaching in China 14

Curriculum ideologies and Chinese students 14Models of culture 16ELT approaches in China 19Communicative Language Teaching in China 21‘Foreign experts’ 25Teachers’ motivations 26Teaching ‘culture’ as part of ELT 30Assessing English language teacher expertise 33Foreign teachers’ experiences in China 36Conclusion 38

3 Theorizing transnationals in China 39

Critical ethnography and ELT 39Problematizing ‘postcolonial resistance’ 42Occidentalism and discourses of difference 46Chinese nationalism and ‘patriotic education’ 51Transnationalism and sensemaking 54Identity and authenticity 57Westerners’ gendered identities in East Asia 60Conclusion 63

vi Contents

4 Showing the workings 64

Qualitative research and grounded theory 64Research practicalities and participants 66Reflexivity, positionality, and ethics 70Stimulated recall: Ollie’s relative clauses lesson 74Limitations of this study 79Conclusion 80

5 Teachers, training, and teaching 81

Foreign teachers at People’s Square University 81Teachers’ work at PSU 83Meet the participants 85Teachers’ paradigms 88Teacher induction and support at PSU 94Circumstantial constraints on effective teaching 95Conclusion 98

6 Understanding oral English 99

The nature and purpose of tertiary education 100The nature of (English) language 102The nature of language learning 105The nature of oral English 108Student output types 111Classroom activities 113Phil’s methodological sleight of hand 116Overcoming student resistance 118Changing practices in oral English 122Conclusion 124

7 The pressure to be ‘fun’ 125

The nature of ‘fun’ in oral English classes 126Effects of ‘fun’ on teachers’ work 129Effects of ‘fun’ on teachers’ morale 131My own teaching at PSU 134Effects of ‘fun’ on teacher development 137Imagining funny foreign teachers 140Bottom up and top down: Pressures to be fun 143Crossing cultures or reinforcing stereotypes? 147Conclusion 150

Contents vii

8 It’s not about English teaching 151

Foreign teacher recruitment 151Foreign teachers or foreign creatures? 154Teaching culture: Western artefacts and meanings 156Teaching culture: Exploring Chinese culture 158The foreign teachers’ role: A clearing in the woods 159Ryan’s story: The ideal foreign teacher? 161Infantilizing Chinese students 163Conclusion 166

9 Gendered identities 168

Becoming superheroes? Constructing Western men 168Transactional relationships and identity tensions 172Men behaving badly 176‘A guy who happens to have breasts’: Western women 180Living under the cloak of invisibility 183Leo and the boys’ club at PSU 187Identity struggles 190Conclusion 192

10 Training outcomes and teacher needs 194

Four models of teacher effectiveness and success 194Critiquing CELTA outcomes 197Critiquing the CELTA model of post-course support 200Leading or misleading? Teacher support at PSU 201Phil’s idealism 204Conclusion 208

11 Constructing and maintaining identities 209

Karen’s story: Mixed and changing motivations 210Teachers’ motivations: Staying in China 211Karen’s story: ‘Trapped’ in ELT 213Foreign teachers as irrelevant 215Appropriating other identities 217Frustrations and notions of superiority 219Conclusion 221

viii Contents

12 Recommendations and reflections 223

Riding a donkey to go looking for a horse 223Multiculturalism with Chinese characteristics 228Revisiting the participants: Beth 232Teacher development: Ollie 235‘Sink or swim’ challenges: Ollie 238Moving on: Dan and Leo 240Transferable capital: Phil and Ryan 244The glitter ball: Reconsidering reflexivity 247

References 254Index 274

Illustrations

1.1 Ramsden’s (1992: 119) model of teaching 61.2 Conceptual model of CELTA-type teaching as a ‘toolkit’ 72.1 Gu and Maley’s (2008: 231) ‘Large/small power distance

societies and teaching and learning cultures’ 174.1 Details of my fieldwork 654.2 Participant teachers’ biographical information (at August 2007) 695.1 Typical foreign teacher timetable 835.2 Semester 1 syllabus 846.1 Teachers’ practices categorized by classroom interaction and

student language output types 1237.1 The ‘dumbing it down’ cycle 1337.2 Classroom materials for loop input activity 1357.3 Conceptual model of expectations and performances 1437.4 Misunderstandings of foreign teachers’ behaviours 14810.1 Four conceptual models of foreign teachers’ purpose 19510.2 Vygotskyan analysis of teacher development at PSU 206

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to many people. Firstly, I would like to thank my academic friends and colleagues who have encouraged and challenged me along the way. Dr Jill Brown (Monash) provided invaluable support in the early stages of the project. Then, in the process of developing this book, I’ve had fantastic conversations with and some very wise advice from: A/Prof Ken Cruickshank (Sydney), A/Prof Gary Barkhuizen (Auckland), A/Prof Neil Murray (Warwick), Prof Suresh Canagarajah (Penn State), Doc Iva Strnadova (UNSW), Dr Matthew Clarke (UNSW), Prof Chris Davison (UNSW), Dr Michael Michell (UNSW), Prof Fazal Rizvi (Melbourne), Prof Alistair McCulloch (UniSA), Dr Peter Willis (UniSA), Hannah Soong (UniSA), Dr Enric Llurda (Lleida), Prof Lixian Jin (De Montfort), Dr Janette Ryan (Oxford), A/Prof Betty Leask (UniSA), A/Prof Gavin Sanderson (UniSA), E/Prof Elspeth Jones (Leeds Met), Dr Viv Caruana (Leeds Met), Dr Jos Beelen (Hogeschool van Amsterdam), Dr Marie Stevenson (Sydney), Dr Sarah Richardson (ACER), Dr Ahmar Mahboob (Sydney), Dr David Nunan (Anaheim/UNSW), Prof Colin Evers (UNSW), Dr Peter Mickan (Adelaide), Nishani Singh (Adelaide), Dale Wache (UniSA), Dr David Birbeck (UniSA), Dr Penny Ding (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool), Mike Gow (Bristol), Sarah Bedford (Sydney), Chris Lawson (DEEWR), Prof Farzad Sharifian (Monash), Dr Ed McDonald (UNSW), Dr Lauren Gorfinkel (UNSW), and last, but certainly not least, the series editor Prof S. Gopinathan (NIE Singapore), publishing executive Jarrod Chun Peng Tam (NIE Singapore), commissioning editor Christina Low (Routledge), and copy editor Laurie Duboucheix-Saunders (LDS Editorial Services). Of course, any errors of fact or judgement that remain after all the efforts of this incredibly talented mob are mine alone.

Secondly, I would like to thank the teachers that this book is about. Without their candidness in sharing their stories and warmth in inviting me into their lives and homes none of this research would have been possible. Many, particularly ‘Beth’, ‘Ryan’, and ‘Dan’, have stayed in touch throughout the research process and their comments on my evolving text have been incredibly useful. Among the many people that I met in China, special mention must go to the participant whose pseudonym is ‘Phil’. The discussions we had throughout the study made me think more deeply about the context, the individuals, and the emerging data. I hope that the extracts from Phil’s interviews convey some of his erudition and

Acknowledgements xi

his ability to see the good in everyone. His optimism has helped make this project hopeful and not ‘all doom and gloom’ about a situation that is sometimes frustrating, often confronting, and always multi-layered.

Then, there’s the money side of things. I’d like to acknowledge the generous financial support of an Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) throughout my 2007–2009 PhD study, the contributions made by Monash University travel and equity scholarships during the same period, and a Postgraduate Publications Award, also from Monash University, in 2010. The 2011 re-visit was partially funded by the Learning and Teaching Unit at the University of South Australia. And, in 2012, I’ve had the blessing of the School of Education at the University of New South Wales to work on the book during office hours: what researcher could ask for more?

Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family, who have heard more about China than I suspect they ever wanted to know. Ed and Doris helped proofread the final text and, like Graeme and Lily, have patiently engaged with my updates and meltdowns throughout. My writer friends Caitlin Tyler, Sam Rodgers, and Simon Behenna have all provided ‘new eyes’ and critical readings at various stages. My ELT friends Diederik van Gorp, Jeanette Barsdell, Heather Parris-Kidd, Tiny Tao, Angie Calton, and Amanda Bailey have all been vital sounding boards for ideas along the way. And finally, my long-suffering friends Miko Wijnands, Natasha English, Cameron Lindsay, Sean Wayman, Tomek Brewko, Caroline Easter, Natalie McCall, Shari Russell, and Kate Borrett provided the wine, the shoulders to cry on, and the loud music to dance to when it all just got too much.

1 Introduction

shanghai (v, tr).To trick or force a person into doing something against his or her will.

Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary (Moore 2004: 1306)

In the mid nineteenth century, world trade relied on clipper sailing ships which, in turn, relied on huge human crews. There was no problem getting workers to join a ship for a passage to California; the gold rush drew exactly the poor, marginal, hopeful men who would normally crew the clipper ships. But finding crews for ships out of California, to Shanghai and beyond, was much harder. And so began the practice of ‘shanghaiing’: tricking or forcing men into sailing to distant ports. Some were drugged or otherwise rendered unconscious and woke up at sea. Others were kidnapped in bars or boarding houses and brought out through the ‘shanghai tunnels’ that ran under West-Coast American cities. ‘Shanghaied’ sailors were not necessarily sailors and although some benefitted from the months of enforced sobriety and physical labour of the clipper ships, all were pushed into something they did not fully understand, that they had not chosen, and that worked in interests other than their own (Alborn 1992; Tamony 1966).

In some ways the ‘teachers’ that are the subject of this study are nothing like the ‘sailors’ on the clipper ship crews of yesteryear: no burly dockworker forces them to go and teach in China and most are treated very well once they arrive. Certainly, few experience enforced sobriety. And, rather than wishing they could stay for an American gold rush, many are glad to leave behind their sometimes limited employment options in depressed Western economies. And yet in this ethnography I contend that they are nevertheless ‘shanghaied in Shanghai’. This is not to say that their experiences are necessarily bad; most of the participants that I focus on in this book can be said to have benefitted from their time in China. But through their experiences I show that, like the shanghaied sailors, all are pushed into something they do not fully understand, that they have not chosen, and that works in interests other than their own.

As for the nature of that ‘something’: although all are hired by a Chinese university as oral English teachers, their primary role does not seem to be to teach

2 Introduction

English. Instead, an Occidentalist Chinese discourse of foreign ‘Otherness’ frames the ‘authenticity’ they are expected to perform. This means they are under pressure to be fun, bubbly, ever-smiling, and entertaining. Their de facto purpose is to represent and provide contact with ‘the West’ and to validate Chineseness, defined against the foil of an Other. As this may not match their own perceived purposes, they are shanghaied into this role.

This is, then, a study of a nether world of the education profession, of native English speaking teachers, or perhaps ‘teachers’, far from home. It explores teacher identity, teacher preparation, and what it means to teach ‘effectively’ in this context. It is also a study of Chinese nationalism, the nature of ‘multi-culturalism’ as this plays out in mainland China’s worldliest city, and the effects of both of these on middle-tier transnational ‘Westerners’ living in Shanghai. Like the non-sailor ‘sailors’, these are ‘teachers’ who would not necessarily be considered teachers elsewhere. Some teach while ‘stoned’ as smoking marijuana allows them to be relaxed enough not to care. Others engage in sexual relationships with their students in the ‘playboy mansion’ of their teaching context. And there are some whose only qualification for the job is a degree of enthusiasm.

But this is not a polemic that argues that such people should be driven out of the teaching profession. Instead, I seek to understand the complexity and contradictions of this teaching situation. Although academics working in English language teaching (ELT) may wish it were otherwise, this soft underbelly of our profession exists. Further, it will continue to exist as long as there is a demand for English, a shortage of communicatively competent local teachers willing to remain in classroom teaching for less money than they can make in other jobs, and the dangerous fallacy that proficiency in a language is sufficient qualification to teach it. So instead of arguing that these teachers should not exist, I seek to understand the reality of this situation and to provide some suggestions as to how it might be improved within the parameters of what is practical, rather than what is desirable in an ideal world.

Contextualizing the study

Annually, more than 10,000 people undertake the University of Cambridge pre-service ELT teacher preparation course called CELTA (Certificate of English Language Teaching to Adults). Many thousands more do other, similar, practically focused short courses. Not all plan to teach and travel but many do, and many such courses are marketed as a way to see the world. And ‘seeing the world’ is no longer the preserve of the super rich and the ‘dropouts’ that created the ‘hippy trail’ across Asia in the 1960s. Instead, an extended overseas sojourn, often as a working holiday, has become an accepted, even expected, practice among British, Australian, and other ‘gap year’ travellers, who are often young people straight out of university.

Meanwhile, China is the single largest English language teaching market in the world: English is compulsory throughout much of schooling and tertiary education, private English language teaching provision is a multi-billion dollar

Introduction 3

industry, and there is a shortage of local teachers of English. There are also people, in China and elsewhere, who believe a native speaker of English to be the best teacher type. As I will discuss, this is an unfounded belief. But as much of Chinese ELT is directly or indirectly market driven, people’s beliefs translate into important realities. And the reality is that there is an enormous demand for sojourning ‘Western’ teachers in China. To obtain a work visa, such teachers need only a university degree in any subject and some kind of certificate in ELT; this might be an online or weekend course.

This creates a nexus in which minimally trained ‘Westerners’ are employed as teachers of English in China, in both the public and private sector. For Chinese students, this may be the first non-Chinese person they have met; for the teachers, this may be their first experience of living and working in another culture. Teachers and students alike come to the encounter with pre-conceived beliefs about the foreign Other, and they may base their subsequent beliefs in part on their experiences of this first-contact encounter. So this is much more than English teaching; it is a site of intercultural contact.

There are political and historical dimensions to the context. Until 30 years ago, contact with foreign nationals was all but unheard of in China, which was largely sealed off from the world. Before that, China was exploited and insulted by various foreign powers. This followed centuries of China’s own empire building. As a result, China has a highly complex relationship with outsiders and its contemporary rise as a superpower is coloured by its political history. The positioning and role of ‘foreign experts’, as work-permit holders are termed in China, must be contextually located in this history; as recently as the mid 1980s, the ruling Chinese Communist Party, the party-state, condemned the ‘spiritual pollution’ brought by foreign influences.

This affects education. The notion of ‘curriculum’ defines everything that is taught and learned in an educational encounter, and this may well go beyond what is intended by curriculum planners and teachers themselves. In learning English from minimally trained foreign ‘teachers’, Chinese students may be learning other, unintended lessons, perhaps lessons about foreign Others. This may be a warm, positive experience in which both sides’ meanings are compared and shared, and everyone leaves the encounter with a greater understanding and appreciation of each other’s culture. But it may not be. As I will show, the university context in which this research was conducted is far from being a site of intercultural bridge building. Instead, the employment of foreign teachers there appears to reinforce existing stereotypes, prejudices, and barriers to understanding, among teachers and students alike.

Perhaps, though, this is simply the price that has to be paid for learning English at this stage of China’s development. As the Qing dynasty scholar Zhang Zhidong advocated in the 1890s, perhaps China should aim to extract expertise and not values from foreigners. (Zhang’s epigram, zhongxue wei ti, xixue wei yong translates as ‘Chinese learning for fundamentals, Western learning for practicalities’).

So perhaps English alone is enough. But the rush and the push for English learning in China must surely be for something, presumably communication with

4 Introduction

the non-Chinese outside world. And so the notion of isolating English language competence from intercultural competence is problematic; language users need to be able to use English to communicate with people who do not necessarily share their own cultures. In addition, the Chinese College English curriculum itself identifies intercultural competence as one of the goals of English language teaching (Chinese Ministry of Education 2007: 32). So the curriculum as it plays out in the research context, in which pre-existing notions about foreign Others go unchallenged and may actually be reinforced, is highly problematic.

There is also uncertainty as to whether the employment of foreign teachers is even effective in teaching English. English language teaching at the research site and in other Chinese universities is divided into separate courses in, for example, grammar, ‘intensive reading’, and writing. These courses lead to the CET examination (College English Test), without which students cannot graduate, but which does not contain a compulsory speaking component. Students at the research site then undertake a subsequent, capstone course called ‘oral English’, whose purpose is to develop students’ oral fluency. At the university in which this study was conducted, as in many other Chinese universities, foreign teachers teach only oral English and oral English is taught only by foreign teachers. So the construct of foreign teachers’ effectiveness is inseparable from the question of the effectiveness of this separated model of English teaching and the ‘orphan’ oral English course that lacks credible CET examination backwash. Does it work? This is central to my discussion.

The context I am introducing, therefore, is one in which the teachers are minimally trained and ‘oral English’ may seem somewhat intangible. Students often arrive in class never having met a real, live foreigner but bringing some baggage of historico-political assumptive paradigms about foreign Others. In addition, teachers on CELTA courses practise teaching with small groups of motivated adult students. This is different from teaching in the research context, in which classes comprise up to 35 students for whom English is compulsory. Also, the teachers themselves may simply be passing through, ‘seeing the world’ before going onto further study or a non-ELT career in their home countries or elsewhere. Most are native English speakers, many have never lived outside their home countries, and all bring themselves and their own cultural and individual paradigms with them. What happens to them? How do they perceive and process the experience? This is what this study is about.

Locating the study

If the following disciplines were mapped, and the various maps were laid out, my study would fall at the very edges of most of the sheets. The disciplines are: education, sociology, politics, history, tourism, anthropology, gender studies, applied linguistics, psychology, and cultural studies. The marginal, liminal areas are not well covered by any of the established disciplines’ maps, but between their edges a space becomes clear; this is my study’s location. Morgan (2004: 82) stresses the importance of expanding knowledge within language teaching and also

Introduction 5

increasing the discipline’s interdisciplinary scope in a way that is intra-disciplinary. This means utilizing ideas from myriad sources to support research in the ‘home’ discipline. Accordingly, my study draws upon, and contextually grounds, literature from various disciplines so as to build a theory about the teachers studied. So this is a study in education; it is about teachers in a university. But it also relates to other disciplines, considering people’s lived realities as transnational Westerners in China, positioned as teachers, and struggling to make sense of their experiences.

My study is different from some other critical studies in ELT. This is not to say I am uncritical; indeed, I am highly critical of the power relations, hegemonies, and other dynamics at work in the context, and in Chapter 3 these are explored in more detail. However, this study is different in that I problematize the assumption, widely espoused, that minimally qualified, White, Western native speaker ‘teachers’ in ‘periphery’ classrooms are (always) the (only) ‘baddies’. As this study shows, power relations in China are far from straightforward. So I critically examine such teachers’ lived experiences as they are lived, which is different from demonizing them for what they represent.

So instead of hoping, as some scholars seem to, that the demand for native speaker teachers will wither away or that they might be replaced by the lofty goal of highly trained, communicatively competent, interculturally competent local teachers, I seek to engage with the reasons Chinese institutions might be hiring ‘foreign teachers’ and what is happening as a result (mainly to the teachers themselves but also to the students and their learning). And my finding is that this is far from a Western neo-colonial endeavour. Indeed, it is as much the teachers who are on the receiving end of some quite powerful essentialism constructed primarily by the Chinese party-state to wrap its own legitimacy in the flag of nationalism, defined against a constructed, Western ‘Other’.

This study is also unique in its subject matter. While the post-training working lives of CELTA-qualified teachers has been studied in an Australian context (Senior 2006), and some attempt is under way to understand such teachers’ post-training lives elsewhere (Green 2005), research has yet to be done on the all too common phenomenon of short-course-trained English language outside their home countries. Anecdotal evidence abounds, of course, and many ELT scholars researching in China pass judgement on ‘Western teachers’ (e.g. Boyle 2000; Cortazzi and Jin 1999; Degen and Absalom 1998; Dooley 2001; J. Jin 2005; M. Li 1999; Melby, Dodgson, and Tennant 2008; F. Yu 2008; Zhao and Grimshaw 2004). But there is little appreciation in the literature of such teachers’ lived realities, experiences, and identities. This study fills that gap. By doing so, it provides a substantial contribution to knowledge in the areas of teachers’ lives, identities, and practices. It also adds topographical detail to the maps of the various disciplines listed above.

Defining the research focus

ELT qualifications are confusing. Different types as well as different levels exist and are accredited by hundreds of institutions of varying degrees of legitimacy.

6 Introduction

Some qualifications are practice based with little theoretical underpinning; others have no practical component and are mainly theoretical. Course duration varies from a weekend to several years. It is therefore difficult to draw a line between ‘qualified’ and ‘unqualified’ English language teachers.

In this study I consider a common qualification type for sojourning teachers, the ‘short’ ELT course, the best example of which is Cambridge CELTA. This qualification is considered sufficient for beginning English language teachers in many contexts (British Council 2007; NEAS 2005). It has been described as a ‘one-size-fits-all’ training that provides beginning teachers with a ‘toolkit’ of classroom skills and activities. CELTA-type courses do not provide much theoretical underpinning, focusing instead on the development of hands-on skills and a knowledge of how English works (Ferguson and Donno 2003; Horne 2003; Kanowski 2004; Macpherson 2003). This type of course was developed in London in the 1960s in response to the needs of untrained native speaker ‘teachers’ in International House language schools, primarily in Europe (Haycraft 1998). Given the confusion of initial ELT qualifications, CELTA is perhaps close to an ‘industry standard’.

However, CELTA’s solution-based training model is problematic. Teaching is more complex than something that can be learned at a surface level and replicated by going through the ‘correct’ motions. While it may be useful to have a ‘toolkit’ of surface-level teaching behaviours, the lack of underpinning rationale may be problematic when new situations or teaching contexts are encountered (Kumaravadivelu, cited by McMorrow 2007).

The following conceptual models illustrate this point. The difference between models assumed by teacher education and teacher training (J. C. Richards 2008) are shown, respectively, in Figures 1.1 and 1.2. In the first, teachers are theoretically grounded; they then put this into practice and are able to go back to theory as novel situations and contexts are encountered. This is the model that underpins theory-based teacher education courses.

Thinking inspecific

situations

Theory ofteaching

Context ofteaching

TEACHINGIN ACTION

Reflection on experience

Figure 1.1 Ramsden’s (1992: 119) model of teaching

Introduction 7

In the second model, shown in Figure 1.2, teachers learn techniques and their practical application. While some awareness of underlying theory and lesson/activity aims is taught on CELTA (Cambridge ESOL 2003), reflection focuses more on how the use of techniques might be improved in practice.

If teaching were entirely predictable, and if the teaching context were very similar to the training context, the model shown in Figure 1.2 would be sufficient in many lessons, and teachers trained on such courses could hope to enjoy classroom success. Similarly, if teachers trained on CELTA-type courses were subsequently supported by academic managers whose own teacher education was more theoretically informed they might be able to adapt their toolkit to new contexts and tackle novel situations as these arose.

What happens, however, when such teachers find themselves in a very different culture of learning from that in which they were trained? What happens when they are bereft of adequate professional support in their work context and they have to get by with the ‘wrong’ toolkit? Do they struggle? Can they cope? Are they effective? What happens to them as teachers? What happens to them as people? These questions first inspired this study. Later, when I started to ask questions about this gap between CELTA-type training and real-world practice, a throwaway comment from a DELTA-trainer friend provided another clue. (DELTA is the next level of University of Cambridge qualification up from CELTA; it is usually taken after two or three years’ classroom teaching experience and while it is still practically focused, it is much more theoretical than CELTA.) Working in China, she said that ‘Western’ teachers who have only worked in China were ‘hell to get through the diploma’. ‘What happens to short-course-trained teachers in China?’ I wondered. This study grew out of my curiosity about these questions.

These initial questions eventually became the book you are holding. The rationale for my choice of research site is linked to these questions themselves. First, I needed a context in which teachers’ training and practice did not ‘match’,

Reflection on practice toimprove use of techniques

Learned teachingtechniques

Practicalapplication

Figure 1.2 Conceptual model of CELTA-type teaching as a ‘toolkit’

8 Introduction

as this offered a crucible in which this situation might be better understood. Next, I needed to find a cohort of short-course-trained teachers who were unable to count on much professional support. Then, I needed to spend time among them learning about what happens to their teaching, and to them, in the context. And so that is what I did. China’s Confucian-heritage culture of learning is distant from the Socratic-heritage culture of learning of ‘Western’ teachers. A university in Shanghai offered the challenge of ‘oral English’ teaching rather than integrated language/skills teaching taught on CELTA-type courses. The research site offered on-site support from an academic manager who was no better qualified than the teachers themselves. And I was able to gain access, and gain acceptance, among a group of teachers so as to spend a total of five months over four visits spread over a four-year period as a participant teacher-researcher.

The questions I answer in this study are as follows:

• To what extent do short ELT courses equip teachers with the skills they need to teach in this context?

• How are teachers’ identities constructed and maintained in this context?

In answering these questions, it is important to say what this research is not. My purpose is not to make claims about all short-course-trained English language teachers or the identities of all ‘Western’ teachers in China. Instead, I hope that my research allows for a deeper understanding of what is happening in this context, including the extent to which short ELT courses are useful for these teachers, and how these individuals are affected by their experiences. My purpose is to use this case study to illuminate and build theory about this type of little-studied context. I have provided plenty of detail so that readers can consider the extent to which this situation is similar to others with which they are familiar. And it is my hope, and my experience of presenting at conferences, that my study resonates with those who have worked in conceptually comparable environments.

My study makes use of grounded theory (Charmaz 2006; Strauss and Corbin 1998), which is an inductive method: the data itself informed the direction of subsequent interviews, data analysis, and eventual theory formation. This method is appropriate to the situation because little was previously known about the lives of transnational short-course-trained teachers in China (or, indeed, anywhere else). Rather than go into the field with pre-conceived hypotheses to test or frameworks into which to fit the data, therefore, I went in with my eyes and ears open and let the data and the participants direct me. This meant interviewing and re-interviewing the same cohort of teachers at a single university. I also taught alongside them, observed their lessons, read surveys from several thousands of their students, and became part of their milieu. This allowed me to build trust but also to experience first-hand something of what the participant teachers experienced. In total, I gathered and transcribed more than 200 hours of audio and video-recorded data. Although this is a large amount of original data for a PhD study, which is what the project was originally, I am aware that it is still a comparatively small sample.

Introduction 9

Navigating the text

In time-honoured tradition, I follow the ‘standard’ layout of: literature-methods-data-discussion-conclusion, but I have made some adaptations within the genre to suit the participants’ somewhat unusual, and previously untold, stories. As explained above, little has been written in the academic literature on teachers’ experiences of teaching outside their home countries, let alone in China. I begin with a review of the literature that does exist in this area, surrounding it with the literature in conceptually adjacent areas. Broadly, this can be summarized as: ‘what it means to be an English language teacher in the context’ (Chapter 2) and ‘what it means to be a Westerner living in China’ (Chapter 3). This is unusual, and has been necessitated by the relative paucity of literature in the area of my study; I have had to cast a wider net.

Chapter 4 then shows the workings of what I did in order to be able to produce the present text. It introduces the people involved in living and telling the stories. This chapter exists for the sake of transparency. Here, for example, I explain how I used the teachers’ own video recordings as a stimulus for their later interviews. Chapters 1 to 4 can thus be conceptualized as the necessary background to make the data, analysis, and discussion comprehensible. Readers who are interested only in the teachers’ stories – other teachers in China, and readers who are not academics, perhaps – may wish to turn straight to Chapter 5 as that is where ‘my’ research begins.

Simply put, Chapters 5 to 9 are the participants’ stories, with my analysis throughout. But this broad-brush description hides what I have done, and this is another unusual aspect of this study. Instead of laying out all the data in a chapter or two and then discussing it in subsequent chapters, I have integrated the data and my grounded theory. This has allowed for participants’ own voices to be cited as much as possible. As I have visited and revisited the research site since collecting the original data this has also allowed for the participants to ‘go deeper’ into their own data by engaging with me on my emerging findings and theorizing about their stories. This is an ethical stance but it is also practical. Little was previously known about such teachers’ lives, and this procedure has allowed for a deeper, more analytical, understanding.

Chapter 5 introduces the research context and explores the teachers’ interactions with their pre-service ELT training courses. Teachers’ training intersects with their identities, beliefs and assumptions, although the relationship between these constructs is far from simple. In Chapter 5, I show how the teachers’ beliefs derive primarily from sources other than their pre-service training. This is important, as the teachers’ purpose and role are never satisfactorily clarified in the context. Chapter 6 then discusses how the various participants interpret their job description. This allows for some clarification as to what ‘oral English’ actually is, although this construct remains one that can be derived only inductively.

Chapter 7 presents the single most important constraint the participants perceive on their work, the pressure from students and from academic managers

10 Introduction

that their lessons should be ‘fun’. The construct of fun is defined, and I posit that one of the main reasons students imagine and expect ‘fun’ teaching from their ‘Western’ teachers is because of the Chinese discursive construction of ‘Westernness’ as distinct from the socially constructed ‘Chinese Self‘ (Cai 2003).

Chapter 8 is then a logical supposition: if the teachers are as minimally trained and as poorly supported as I show in Chapter 5; if oral English is as nebulous as Chapter 6 suggests; and if the teachers really experience the constraints that I describe in Chapter 7, then their purpose at the university simply cannot be to teach English. Their job is impossible. Chapter 8 therefore considers the tantalizing possibility of a different purpose. It is suggested that the teachers’ role is, in part, to represent Chinese notions of ‘the West’. However, this purpose in which visiting English teachers might be cultural curiosities rather than teachers is problematic as the role (as it is constructed by expected practices) is highly essentialist of the foreign Other. I argue that oral English may therefore serve to reinforce stereotyping and reductionism rather than to achieve its ostensible purpose of developing intercultural competence. This discussion continues in Chapter 11, as it affects teachers’ own identity constructions.

In the meantime, Chapter 9 examines differences in participants’ experiences of living and working in Shanghai. These differences depend on two variables: the way individuals are treated (which varies according to their identity as it is attributed by people in the context) and the way they process the experience (which varies by the pre-existing habitus that individuals bring to the context, including their own appropriated identities and purposes for being in China). Individuals’ experiences differ, and in Chapter 9 I describe a continuum along which I locate the participants in terms of their reconciliation of their own appropriated and attributed identities. The most salient difference, however, in the participants’ experiences relates to gendered identities. So in Chapter 9, I examine the very different experiences that the men and women in the study appear to have in the context. This is related to the literature, reviewed in Chapter 3, on transnational gendered identities, particularly masculinities.

Having said that my analysis is integrated throughout the data, I have also included traditional ‘discussion’ sections on the research questions in Chapters 10 and 11. In these chapters I draw upon the discussions up until this point to explain the findings. While Chapters 10 and 11 do feature the participants’ voices, their main function is to build theory from what might otherwise be just an engaging series of stories. The discussion is then drawn together in Chapter 12, in which I conclude my study and examine its implications and some possible directions for further research. I also revisit the questions of ethics and reflexivity by discussing the effects my study has had on the participants.

Notes on terminology

Some brief notes on terminology are needed before I begin. Throughout the text, I refer to ‘foreign teachers’, to ‘Western’ ideas and methodologies, and ‘Westerners’. I make less mention of ‘native-speaker teachers’. The idea of

Introduction 11

‘nativeness’ and ‘native speakers’ of English comes up in the data, usually implicitly rather than explicitly. But mostly the teachers refer to themselves as ‘Westerners’ or ‘foreign teachers’ and sometimes as laowai or waiguoren, which are Chinese terms for ‘foreigner’ (the latter, literally, ‘outside country person’). These Chinese terms do not have such negative connotations as ‘foreigner’ does in English. I am well aware that all of these contested, situated, problematic labels and ideas, and that their construction and use in the research site is not always the same as their meaning in the literature. However, they are both attributed to and appropriated by the non-Chinese English teachers in the context and, in keeping with the ‘emic’ orientation to research, explained in Chapter 4, I use them throughout. But the contested nature of these terms is why, up to this point, I have used ‘scare quotes’ around them; I intend less to appropriate these labels than to problematize them. From Chapter 2 on, for ease of reading, I omit the scare quotes. But the terms remain problematic, as this study demonstrates.

In purely linguistic terms, nativeness is a slippery idea (Davies 2003). Viewed through the lens of critical applied linguistics (Pennycook 2010), nativeness is more complex still, conflated as it may be with Whiteness, ‘Western culture’, ‘Western teaching methods’, and the ownership of English (Brutt-Griffler and Samimy 2001; Holliday 2008; Kabel 2008). However, do not think this is why the ‘native’ label is used less often by the teachers and other stakeholders in the research setting. Instead, as I show in this study, the implicit role of the teachers, and their most relevant form of ‘capital’ (Bourdieu 1986) may be their foreignness, specifically their ‘Westernness’, rather than their ‘nativeness’ in English. So ‘foreign teacher’ is a better label than ‘native speaker teacher’ as ‘foreignness’ is more salient, in the context, than ‘nativeness’.

A ‘foreign teacher’ is a non-Chinese teacher; this parallels the way the Chinese social imaginary constructs ‘Chineseness’ and ‘foreignness’ as a binary Self/Other dichotomy, in which the ‘foreign’ may be conceptualized as rather more singular than plural (Farrer 2005; Gries 2006; H. Li 2008; Stanley 2012a; Suzuki 2007). Like ‘foreigners’, ‘foreign teachers’ represent the ‘Other’. And, as I discuss in chapter 3, such Othering has a very specific purpose: the construction and maintenance of national identity and the maintenance of legitimacy (or at least on-going power) of the party-state.

‘Other’, ‘Otherness’, and ‘Othering’ are also terms that require explanation. The late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński (2008:44–45) wrote:

Others … are the mirror in which I look at myself, and which tells me who I am. When I lived in my country I was not aware that I am a white man and that this could have any significance for my fate. Only once I found myself in Africa was I immediately informed of this[.]

Kapuściński uses the example of colour: in Poland, whiteness is not ‘marked’ whereas it had great bearing on his experiences in African war zones in the 1970s and 1980s. But perceived Otherness can fall along any axis of perceived difference: Kapuściński was arguably just as ‘Other’ on his return to Poland as few Poles

12 Introduction

travelled abroad in those days. Otherness, then, is not necessarily visible but entails the perception of difference, the construction of significance around this difference, and the resultant use of the constructed Other in defining the Self. Laclau and Mouffe, after Derrida (Laclau 1990: 17–26; Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 127–134), call this the ‘constitutive outside’, the existence of which is a necessary component of social phenomena. In order to define what a nation, or individual, or group is (or, rather, imagines itself to be) it is necessary to delineate what it is not. ‘Othering’ is when that process involves the construction of and essentialism about an ‘Other’ (or, perhaps, an ‘Othered’). This is why there is no fixed-once-and-for-all definition of what it ‘means’ to be ‘Chinese’ or ‘Western’ or any other category. Social constructions are sites of fluidity and struggle, and in-group versions are likely to be contested by out-group constructions, and vice versa. This is not to say that one construction is more real than the other, rather than the constructions exist among different discursive communities for different purposes.

In China, ‘the West’ exists within the conceptual box marked ‘foreign’, and there is something of a love/hate, victim/victor relationship with ‘the West’ in China (Cai 2003; Conceison 2004; Farrer 2005; Gries 2005, 2006; H. Li 2008). But ‘the West’, in China, is a Chinese construction:

[T]he West does not denote a geographic region but rather a field of meanings. Local and global media, such as pirated Western … DVDs, form the basis on which Chinese conceptions of the West are based. These raw cultural materials are refined into complex concepts. The final product is only tangentially related to the raw materials themselves. Thus, the process is better described as the creative use of foreign cultural products rather than the direct impact of Western culture on Chinese society. … In this sense, the West is ‘(re)made in China’.

(T. Zheng 2006: 170)

While all the participant teachers in this study were monolingual or English-dominant bilingual speakers of ‘inner-circle’ Englishes, from the USA, the UK, and Canada, other non-native ‘Westerners’ may teach English in Shanghai: I interviewed teachers from France, Belgium, and Poland, for example. Similarly, although Whiteness may be part of the expected ‘Westerner’ package, two of the study participants have Chinese parents and do not consider themselves White. As I discuss, more important than the biographies of the teachers is their performance of Westernness, as this is locally constructed. Non-white or non-native teachers may have to exaggerate this performance, but provided they can perform as expected they can be accepted as ‘Western’. So although I contest the terms ‘foreign’, ‘Western’, and ‘native’, they appear throughout this study as they are used for specific purposes in the research context. As this is a critical ethnography, I seek both to understand the situation from the participants’ points of view and also to problematize the power relations at work within it.

Three final terms need clarification. One is the word ‘data’, which, in common with Holliday (2008), I use as an uncountable noun; data is, not data are. This is

Introduction 13

because of my non-numeric data, which, like ‘information’, I do not see as conceptually divisible into discrete, countable items. Then, there are various acronyms to describe the profession (or industry) in which this study is situated: it may be TESOL or ELT and sometimes TEFL. TESOL stands for ‘Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages’ and while this term is commonly used in north America and Australia it is arguably problematic because of its implied ‘Othering’ of the very learners it seeks to engage. I therefore prefer, and use throughout, the term ELT: ‘English Language Teaching’. This term is more common in the UK and is, I feel, more neutral. TEFL, which now seems to be falling out of favour, is ‘Teaching English as a Foreign Language’ and, historically, described English teaching in contexts where English has no official status.

2 English teaching in China

There is little in the way of established scholarship that constitutes the ‘field’ of studies in this area. When surveying the existing literature on transnational English teachers in developing countries one finds enclaves of specific interests and small, isolated articles. Few are academic; many are polemic. So in my literature review I have drawn on sources from myriad disciplines so as to situate the interdisciplinary gap in which my study is located. This has necessitated two contextualizing chapters: while Chapter 2 maps the literature on English teaching in China, Chapter 3 considers Westerners’ experiences in China more broadly including theoretical frameworks with which to understand their experiences.

Curriculum ideologies and Chinese students

Lixian Jin and Cortazzi (2006: 9) define cultures of learning as:

[T]aken-for-granted frameworks of expectations, attitudes, values and beliefs about how to teach or learn successfully and about how to use talk in interaction … A culture of learning frames what teachers and students expect to happen in classrooms.

Cultures of learning therefore establish paradigms of what is thought to be ‘normal’ in classrooms, and these differ by context. ‘Context’ here refers not to essentialist national contexts, such as ‘the Chinese context’, as if this were homogenous, but to the contexts of individual classrooms and institutions, which may differ socio-economically and culturally (Holliday 2009).

Teachers’ cultures of learning have been attributed to the ‘apprenticeship of observation’, which Borg (2004: 274) describes as:

The phenomenon whereby student teachers arrive for their courses having spent thousands of hours as schoolchildren observing and evaluating professionals in action. … This model thus provides student teachers with ‘default options’, a set of tried and tested strategies which they can revert to in times of indecision or uncertainty.

English teaching in China 15

Additionally, educational policymakers and institutions are themselves embedded in particular cultures of learning, and this influences the ideologies underlying curriculum planning (Ho 2002). ‘Curriculum ideology’ refers to the purpose of education, or, in this case, the purpose of learning English (ibid.).

J. C. Richards (2001: 113–120) describes five curriculum ideologies: academic rationalism, social and economic efficiency, learner-centeredness, social reconstructionism, and cultural pluralism. The most relevant of these to the present study are the first two. Academic rationalism can be conceptualized as education for its own sake, and for its role in developing students’ intellect and character. This may include handing down cultural norms and traditions. In contrast, social and economic efficiency refers to ‘the role of an educational program in producing learners who are economically productive’ (ibid.: 115). This model also assumes that it is possible, and desirable, for educationalists to pre-determine students’ future needs.

But curriculum documents may not reflect the curriculum as it actually occurs. The relationship between intended curricula and actual teaching and learning is complex, and there is a difference between a prescriptive view of what should happen and a descriptive view of what does happen. Accordingly, Print (1993: 9) defines ‘curriculum’ as:

[A]ll the planned learning opportunities offered to learners by the educational institution and the experiences learners encounter when the curriculum is implemented.

Curriculum, then, is the total package that learners experience as a result of education, including the unintended effects or ‘hidden curriculum’ (Meighan, Harber, Barton, Siraj-Blatchford, and Walker, 2007). As classrooms are socially and locally situated, and teachers and learners are socially positioned, the hidden curriculum refers to embedded attitudes, values, beliefs, and norms.

Within this, Chinese students have been stereotyped as quiet, passive rote learners, who are respectful of teachers and teaching materials, and whose learning practices represent the lower orders of abstraction in Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy, such as learning facts. Learners are seen as uncritical thinkers and reluctant to express opinions or to question their teachers (Atkinson 1997; Bodycott and Walker 2000). L. Jin and Cortazzi (2006: 9) point to the unique nature of the Chinese character-based writing system and the practices employed in teaching literacy as the basis for understanding Chinese students’ educational apprenticeships: primary school practices include ‘demonstration, modelling, tracing, repeated copying, and ultimately active memorization’. Additionally and perhaps as both cause and effect of Chinese learners’ ostensible passivity, Chinese teachers enjoy high social status, which relies on being seen as knowledgeable and authoritative (Hu 2002).

Jin and Cortazzi (2006: 14) cite Hinton’s (1998) translation of the Confucian dictum: ‘to learn and never think – that’s delusion. But to think and never learn that is perilous indeed’. Biggs (1996: 55) uses this same dictum to explain Chinese learners’ reluctance to express their critiques until they feel they have mastered the


material under consideration: ‘In the West, we believe in exploring first, then in the development of skill; the Chinese believe in skill development first … after which there is something to be creative with.’ Thus, Chinese learners may not, in fact, be unable or unwilling to think critically, but may see themselves primarily as learners, whose critical analyses should wait until they are in possession of all the facts.

So stereotypes about Chinese learners may be misunderstandings, and many scholars have critiqued these. Curro and McTaggart (2003), working in an Australian university context, attribute Chinese students’ apparent passivity in class to a lack of academic English skills, arguing that Chinese students’ out-of-class cooperative learning strategies, such as group discussions about course content, may allow for understanding that is just as ‘deep’ as that of their Australian peers, albeit accessed in a different way. Also in a Western university context, Gieve and Clark (2005) found Chinese learners to be at least as adaptable to different learning styles as their European peers and that they were as able to self-direct their own learning. Similarly, Shi (2006: 122) found that secondary school students in Shanghai showed ‘little difference from their Western counterparts by being active learners and preferring a more interactive relationship with their teachers’. It is therefore unwise to generalize about China’s culture of learning, as its education system is vast, heterogeneous, and the subject of many reforms. However, some aspects of China’s cultures of learning may be explicable with reference to Confucian-heritage cultures more generally, which are also, of course, varied and in constant flux.

Models of culture

Researching corporate cultures in different countries, Hofstede (1980/2001, 1991/2005) developed a framework of cultural dimensions along whose continua he located the cultures studied. He categorizes the Chinese as located towards the extreme ends of four of his five dimensions, with Americans towards the opposite end from China in three dimensions. According to Hofstede (1991/2005), China is a large power-distance culture with a long-term orientation; China emphasizes collectivism over individualism and places a relatively high value on the ‘masculine’ values of, for example, wealth acquisition. If we accept this model, we can expect Chinese students to respect their teachers, as group harmony, long-term orientation, and ‘face-saving’ status-preservation are valued (Walker and Dimmock 2000; V. C. X. Wang 2006). Similarly, Chinese learners might be instrumentally motivated in their learning as their long-term focus may be to obtain certificates with which to secure employment in a highly competitive job market (Bai 2006). These would fit Hofstede’s models of wealth acquisition and long-term orientation.

Gu and Maley (2008: 231) also cite Hofstede’s work, on power distance, although their study is critical of cultural determinism and they note that other factors also affect successful intercultural adaptation; their context is Chinese students in UK higher education. While they are critical of abstracted constructs such as ‘the Chinese learner’ they offer a comparison table of educational


expectations deriving from Hofstede’s power distance continuum. This is shown in Figure 2.1.

Hofstede’s work has been strongly criticized, however. McSweeney (2002) cites Anderson’s (1991) work on nations as ‘imagined communities’ that are real only insofar as they are socially constructed. Within this, one cannot hope to describe homogeneous or static ‘national’ cultures (Kwek 2003; Myers and Tan 2002), and, as such, it is essentialist and deterministic to designate certain cultural traits and call them ‘Chinese culture’ at all.

Fougère and Moulettes (2005) also critique Hofstede’s model, this time as a colonizing discourse: by classifying cultures and comparing cultural values, Hofstede’s study serves to legitimize cultural Othering and a postcolonial ‘third world’ discourse of cultural backwardness and linear stages of development. Holliday (2009) makes a similar critique of Hofstedian ‘old thinking’ (145) on the grounds that national cultural divisions are essentialist and because such models of culture are positioned in cultural politics. He writes:

[T]hey project concepts of a culturally superior Centre-Western Self and an inferior Other onto the rest of the world, and the individualist notion of self-determination represents a discourse of political interference – a mandate for correcting and changing the imagined indolence of the cultures of the East and the South.

(Holliday 2009: 148)

Implicit in the discourse that Holliday critiques is a modernist, linear view of development that conceives a hierarchy of cultures and positions the West as more advanced along a single path of development, with other cultures as several steps behind. This is different from a postmodern model in which there are myriad routes to ‘development’ (Escobar 1995). Hofstede’s use of linear cultural comparisons invites a deficiency model of development.

Large power distance societies Small power distance societies

A teacher merits the respect of his/her students (Confucius)

A teachers should respect theindependence of his/her students

Teacher-centred education Student-centred education

Students expect teacher to initiatecommunication

Teacher expects students to initiatecommunication

Students speak up in class only wheninvited by the teacher

Students may speak up spontaneously in class

Effectiveness of learning related toexcellence of the teacher

Effectiveness of learning related toamount of two-way communication inclass

Figure 2.1 Gu and Maley’s (2008: 231) ‘Large/small power distance societies and teaching and learning cultures’


Signorini, Wiesemes, and Murphy (2009) also critique Hofstede’s model for its assumption of cultural homogeneity within nations, its datedness, and its irrelevance to educational contexts (Hofstede’s research was undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s in a business environment). They prefer Spencer-Oatey’s (2000: 4) definition of culture:

[A] fuzzy set of attitudes, beliefs, behavioural conventions and basic assumptions that are shared by a group of people and that influence each member’s behaviours and their interpretation of the meaning of other people’s behaviour.

Spencer-Oatey’s definition compares to Carbaugh’s (2007: 24):

Rather than treating culture as a set of abstract dimensions, we can conceptualize culture as a historically transmitted system of discursive practices. … These discursive practices typically invoke a rich and ongoing commentary along several dimensions of meanings, thereby saying something about who we are (and should be), how we are (and should be) related, how we can (and should) act, how we feel about what is going on, and how we dwell in our places. … We [should] relocate culture from cognitive dichotomies into cultural discourses. … Onward then, in understanding the cultural variety in discursive ways … honouring local wisdom, reflecting upon the best each has to offer, from cultures in cognition, to cultures in conversation.’

Carbaugh’s and Spencer-Oatey’s definitions emphasize culture as evolving, negotiated discursive social practices rather than as socially-derived ‘software of the mind’, as Hofstede’s model would have it. Cultures are seen as multi-layered, heterogeneous, and ‘fuzzy’. This means that individuals move between different cultural groupings, whose edges are blurred, appropriating culture along the way. Crucially, Carbaugh’s and Spencer-Oatey’s definitions of culture do not try to allocate culture deterministically, by country of birth or passport. These later definitions, rather than Hofstede’s, therefore inform this study.

However, Hofstedian distinctions may have some value in contexts where the ideology of education is conceived as academic rationalism and/or social and economic efficiency (J. C. Richards 2001). This is because these models would seek, respectively, to use education as a vehicle to transmit norms and traditions and to define and teach towards a set of social needs and roles into which learners might fit; such needs would necessarily be essentialist. These curriculum ideologies underpin Chinese education, at least historically; Feng (2006: 86) cites Mao Zedong’s (1977) vision of education:

Our general policy in education is to enable the educated to become workers who have thoroughly developed morally, intellectually, and physically, and have gained socialist consciousness and culture.


However, this quote is over 30 years old, and China has changed beyond recognition in that time. We might therefore question the extent to which this ideology of education remains in place today. While the rhetoric of ‘socialist consciousness’ is gone, the (2007) College English curriculum states its purpose as ‘meeting the needs of the country and society for qualified personnel in the new era’ (Chinese Ministry of Education 2007: 24). This is social and economic efficiency.

Of course, this is only the English curriculum, and Feng (2006) discusses Chinese curriculum ideology more broadly, describing ‘an approach combining knowledge transmission and active engagement of pupils in the political learning and morality developing process’ (96). This is theorized as ‘technical rationality’, that is, a blend of academic rationalism and the skills training of social and economic efficiency, in which the inculcation of beliefs, values, and normative social codes are transmitted with the objective of creating citizens who fit in (103). Thus while individual students each bring their own individual selves, backgrounds, motivations, positionality, sub-cultural group affiliations, and so on, the homogenizing effect of education may make it possible to identify cultural traits that are characteristic of learners in the context of this educational system. This is not Hofstedian cultural determinism but the effects of educational ideology. It would appear, then, that while the cultures of Chinese learners are not as homogenous as some of the stereotypical images discussed above would suggest, certain ‘situated identities’ (Clark and Gieve 2006) exist as a product of educational ideology and socialization.

ELT approaches in China

These also affect Chinese teachers, and this section considers how English is taught in China. Adamson (2004) provides an overview of ELT’s sometimes colourful history in China, in which English teaching has, variously, been banned, promoted, and reserved for elites. He identifies the various phases that have characterized its curriculum development, culminating in the current phase whose beginning he puts at 1993. In this current phase, Adamson argues, a synthesis is emerging in which structural and communicative views of language are being combined and methodological ideas from overseas are being incorporated into traditional, Chinese ideas about language teaching, resulting in an increasing emphasis being placed on ‘the use of the language for purposeful communication’ (172). It was not always so. Adamson (2004: 172–173) cites Liu (1995) who writes that:

It is the first time in the history of EFL in China that the actual use of the language for communication should be placed in such a prominent position. This indicates that schools will no longer teach students about the language but teach them how to use it.

Adamson (2004: 174) quotes from the 1993 curriculum document for secondary school teachers that says, ‘time devoted to students practising using the language


must exceed teacher-centred instruction’. Thus, China’s traditional, structural approach would appear to have been reformed twenty years ago, and we might expect communication-oriented English language teaching to be taking place around the country. But we would be wrong.

In fact, ELT approaches in China do not uniformly live up to Ministry of Education rhetoric but are diverse and are subject to myriad influences besides the curriculum documents. These include: examination backwash, institutional cultures including class sizes and curriculum separation, and teachers’ own beliefs, pedagogies, and practices. Examination backwash is a particularly important constraint on communicative language teaching as there are two key examinations, the College Entrance Exam (CEE) and the College English Test (CET), towards which teachers perceive it is their role to prepare students at high school and university level respectively. Neither examines students’ communicative competence. Because of these examinations, teachers complain they are under pressure to cover the syllabus, which is expressed quantitatively as a large number of grammatical and lexical areas to be learned, or perhaps learned about, as CEE and CET rely heavily on discrete-item testing including multiple-choice items (Cheng 2008; W. Gu and Liu 2005; G. Jin 2008; L. Jin, Singh, and Li 2005; S. Wang 2004). As a result, teachers may complain they have no time for ‘activities’ in which students might use English (e.g. Ng and Tang 1999). Even where teaching materials are designed to be used for communicative language teaching (CLT), teachers may not use them as such (Hu 2002; Hui 1997; L. Jin et al. 2005) perhaps thinking communicative materials are only for ‘strengthening the students’ oral expression and not for improving their grammar’ (Z. Li and Song 2007: 63).

Additionally, large class sizes may be a constraint on teachers’ classroom practices, as may be teachers’ own language and teaching abilities (Groves 2002; Ng and Tang 1999). This latter constraint is particularly important as many teachers themselves have limited communicative competence in English, and many have had little pedagogical training, instead perhaps having been schooled in a declarative knowledge about English language (Anderson 1993; Groves 2002; Hu 2005a, 2005c; Nunan 2003; Yu 2001; Zheng and Davison 2008: 11). Chinese teachers’ own ‘apprenticeships of observation’ (Borg 2004; Lortie 1975) may also affect how English is taught in practice.

Another issue is the separation of university-level English language teaching into different courses in listening comprehension, writing, and ‘intensive reading’; the latter comprises micro-analysis of lexis presented through texts. At the research site these three courses comprise English language study for the first two years of tertiary education. Although each course is ostensibly macro-skills based, language-dense assessment backwash from CET examinations reduces time that can be spent on actual skills development (Lixian Jin and Cortazzi 2003), and as a result all these courses may in practice become vehicles for discrete-item grammar and lexis transmission (W. Gu and Liu 2005; Ji 2005; G. Jin 2008; Lingjie Jin et al. 2005). The development of students’ macro skills (i.e. holistic, process-oriented, meaning-focused language use) is therefore marginalized. This means that the development of students’ speaking macro skill, as conceived by Folse (2006), for example, is


regarded as separate from and subsequent to the ‘learning’ of English by learning (about) its discrete parts. This explains the existence of ‘oral English’ as a capstone course designed to ‘activate’ students’ English. Oral English is thus located at the nexus of discrete-item teaching/learning and examination backwash from predominantly structural examinations. Its brief is ambitious; to fill the gap between students’ actual learning (of discrete language items) and the stated curriculum objective (of producing communicatively competent English users).

These influences combine to produce an educational environment in which:

[L]earning involves mastering a body of knowledge ... Both teachers and learners are concerned with the end product of learning – that is, they expect that the learner will, at an appropriate time, be able to reproduce the knowledge. … [D]eductive presentation tends to be favoured over inductive, and the teaching and use of learning strategies such as prediction and contextualisation are in general neglected. A further result is that, in language teaching, the use of the mother tongue tends to be stressed.

(Brick 2004: 149–150)

This is a product approach to learning, in which learning objects are transmitted by teachers and acquired by learners. It can be contrasted with a process approach in which skills are developed. Wette and Barkhuizen (2009) found that tertiary teachers struggled to reconcile these conflicting objectives and C. Yan (2012), researching Chinese high school teachers’ responses to recent ELT curriculum reforms, found that although most teachers were enthusiastic about the newly introduced communicative curriculum there was a significant implementation gap. While the rhetoric of ‘communicative’ teaching has been strengthened, and while more communicative teaching materials are now in use, teachers still face significant challenges including their own pedagogical preparation and backwash from still predominantly structural examinations. As a result, ELT remains product oriented and may be conducted largely in Chinese.

Thus, while Chinese learners may be more flexible than the stereotypes suggest, it would appear that Chinese teachers are more conservative perhaps as a result of the many constraints on their teaching. In this context, teachers are expected to implement a CLT methodology, and the next section considers whether this is possible and/or desirable.

Communicative Language Teaching in China

A lively debate is currently taking place on the appropriateness, or otherwise, of communicative language teaching (CLT) in China. Pham (2007) defines CLT as comprising three tenets. Firstly, language proficiency is understood as communicative competence (Canale and Swain 1980; Hymes 1971). Secondly, second languages are thought to be acquired by learners using the language meaningfully as opposed to learning about language or manipulating language form. Thirdly, CLT takes a ‘communicative approach’ to classroom teaching, including, for example, pair work


and group work activities in which students negotiate meaning and produce language output. Lightbown and Spada (1999: 141–149) cite research supporting a weak CLT approach, and conclude (152) that:

[F]orm-focused instruction and corrective feedback provided within the context of communicative programs are more effective in promoting second language learning than programs which are limited to a virtually exclusive emphasis either on accuracy or on fluency.

However, much research into second language acquisition, including that cited by Lightbown and Spada (1999), has been undertaken in Western learning environments. The finding that an approach or methodological ‘technology’ worked in one context may not prove that it would work equally well elsewhere. Tudor (2001: 9) explains:

[I]t is unsafe to assume that the effects of educational technology can be predicted confidently from the inner logic of technology alone, as this inner logic invariably interacts with the perceptions and goals involved with those using it.

Tudor proposes, instead, an ecological approach, which ‘focuses attention on human and pragmatic factors which influence the use and likely effectiveness of the technology’ (10). Further, Bax (2003: 279) condemns what he terms the ‘CLT attitude’, held by some teachers, that those contexts that do not employ CLT are ‘somehow backward’ and that CLT is the single correct way to learn a language. This is a critique of CLT as pedagogical imperialism.

These issues are at the heart of the debate, and much has been written on the contextual appropriateness, or otherwise, of CLT in China. Some writers, for example Liao (2004), enthusiastically advocate off-the-shelf CLT for all Chinese contexts, although this argument is rather simplistic: because the Chinese government has introduced CLT it must be best for China. Liao’s (2004) paper both lacks convincing evidence and makes problematic assumptions about CLT and Chinese ELT contexts (Hu 2005d). In a slightly different vein, Song and Fu (2004), while critiquing Western CLT as a model that sets native speaker competency up as an unattainable goal for learners, propose that an intercultural CLT be adapted for China. In common with Liao, however, their argument is somewhat idealistic and tends to gloss over potential resistance to communicative teaching, given the constraints mentioned above.

In fact, far more writers reject than advocate CLT in terms of one or more of Pham’s (2007) three tenets: CLT’s goals, theoretical basis, and classroom practices. L. Zhang (2004: 2) reports a commonly-held teacher belief that:

[I]t is not feasible to adopt CLT because China has its special characteristics, including lack of real English environment, teachers’ inability to teach communicatively, and grammar-focused examination pressures.


Further, V. C. X. Wang writes that implementing CLT in China is ‘a dream yet to be realized’ (2006: 61), as there exist the constraints of the expected roles of teachers and learners, examination backwash, and teachers being overworked because of the pressure of low pay and second jobs.

Other writers have found a third way in the CLT-in-China debate, and G. Ellis (1996) describes potential points of conflict for Western teachers employing CLT in Asian settings, arguing that teachers should ‘mediate’ or filter the method to fit the local context. Similarly, Bjorning-Gyde and Doogan (2004) propose a fusion model of teaching for China, in which the strengths of Western and Chinese methodologies are blended. Perhaps, then, an answer lies in blending CLT with traditional Chinese approaches. This is the implicit theory behind some home-grown English-learning crazes in China, such as Li Yang’s ‘Crazy English’, which blends accuracy-focused drilling with confidence-enhancing learner output (Osnos 2008).

However, Hu argues that CLT and Chinese cultures of learning are at irreconcilable odds, embodying, as they do, very different underlying ideologies and philosophies, and espousing contradictory roles of teachers and learners. Hu argues that the processes, strategies, and goals of CLT compared to Chinese ELT are simply too different, and that:

[A] methodology is only effective to the extent that teachers and students are willing to accept and implement it with good faith, and whether it is accepted or not is largely determined by the set of values and beliefs that these teachers and students have been socialized into.

(Hu 2002: 102)

Hu concludes that while China should borrow from CLT where appropriate to Chinese needs, any loans should not change Chinese classroom practices. He identifies some possible areas of CLT that may be beneficially adopted in China as: ‘collaborative learning, cultivation of sociolinguistic competence, use of authentic materials, and learning strategy training’ (ibid.).

One key difference between CLT and Chinese traditional teaching methods is CLT’s process approach compared to a product approach to learning. Writing about CLT in Confucian cultures, Greenholtz (2003: 123) notes that:

Students from non-Socratic, teacher-centred, canonical learning environments may not recognize that they are being taught anything. … If students come from an education tradition that does not emphasize the process of generating knowledge (but rather, the product), they may not recognize what is happening in a Socratic classroom as legitimate pedagogy.

CLT may therefore lack face validity in China, if teachers and learners do not perceive it as legitimate pedagogy. This would hinder the implementation of blended models.


The three stances discussed, of acceptance, rejection and blending of CLT in China, are each problematic in their own ways. How, then, are we to reconcile this debate? It appears there are currently some insurmountable constraints preventing the adoption of a Western CLT model. These are, firstly, the issue of teachers’ resistance to and often misunderstanding of CLT and its implicit underpinning theories of language, as systemic, meaning-based discourse, and language learning as acquisition through communicative use (J. C. Richards and Rodgers 2001). The second constraint is Chinese teachers’ own widespread lack of communicative competence in English. The third is backwash from all-important, structure-based examinations. Perhaps these constraints will change, if, for example, the CEE/CET examination systems are overhauled so that they test communicative competence, and if teachers’ salaries are significantly increased so that communicatively competent Chinese users of English are not lost to other industries, as is currently often the case (Lixian Jin and Cortazzi 2003: 141). The remaining obstacle, of teachers’ resistance to CLT, may also be changing. As discussed, research on learners’ cultures of education finds them to be rather more flexible as learners than Chinese teachers are as teachers. There is therefore hope that CLT might be relevant to Chinese contexts sometime in the future, as today’s learners become tomorrow’s teachers.

As for whether CLT is cultural imperialism; in my view, although Chinese methods can produce communicatively competent users of English, mostly they do not. Even where success is evident, as with three students who acquired competence through memorization and imitation (Ding 2007), such methods may not be the most efficient; learners in Chinese universities often taken ten or more years to reach low intermediate competence, with low levels of confidence and fluency. In fact, successful Chinese learners of English have often acquired English through process-oriented use of English, albeit not in the classroom; ‘English corners’ are a home-grown participatory learning environment (Lixian Jin and Cortazzi 2006) and online communities of language learners also offer learners a chance to use English (Gao 2007). It appears, and there is an irony here, that some critical ELT scholars may themselves be culturally imperialistic, while doing Chinese learners a disservice, if they put their own agenda of methodological relativism and postcolonial hyper-awareness ahead of responding to demands for effective language teaching. While it is true that there are many ways to teach English, it is also true that there are many ways in which language teaching can be ineffective. As it has been found that CLT can produce proficient users of foreign languages, the task at hand is to discover, in cooperation with our Chinese colleagues, how to make language teaching more effective and efficient, not to throw the CLT baby out with the cultural imperialism bathwater. Dingwall (1997: 64) asks: ‘What is the value of a scholarly enterprise that is more concerned with being ‘right on’ than with being right?’ With this in mind, it seems that much of the consternation about CLT’s inappropriateness for China appears to be a scholarly wringing of hands about methodological imperialism rather than a serious attempt to address China’s needs.


‘Foreign experts’

In the meantime, one way in which Chinese institutions have sought to overcome the difficulties in implementing CLT is to import native- and near-native-speaker teachers, or perhaps ‘teachers’. Phillipson (1992: 195) considers unqualified native speaker teachers ‘potentially a menace’, and an analogy with which to understand the problem might be that the teaching of English by untrained native speakers is like employing fish to teach SCUBA diving: fish are perfectly at ease in the water but have no idea how they are doing it, let alone how to teach it.

Much has been written on the somewhat intangible notion and complex identity politics of ‘nativeness’. Davies (2003) proposes mainly linguistic ‘nativeness’ criteria but his definition ignores much of the complex baggage of ‘nativeness’ as it is constructed in the field of English language teaching. The myth, and mystique, of ‘the native speaker’ pervades ELT, giving us the issue of ‘native-speakerism’, which Holliday (2008: 119–120) describes as:

[A] deeply pervasive ideology within the English language teaching profession … an established belief that ‘native-speaker’ teachers represent a ‘Western culture’ from which spring the ideals both of the English language and of English language teaching methodology. … While native-speakerism originates in the English-speaking West, it is subscribed to by English language educators everywhere.

I return to this issue in Chapter 3 in the discussion of teacher identities. In the meantime, there is an enormous market for native speakers as ‘teachers’, of English in China.

One rationale for the employment of unqualified native English speakers, who are often employed to teach mainly oral English (Zhao and Grimshaw 2004), is that ‘in the absence of both training and subject knowledge, [they] often have no recourse but to talk to their students’ (Thornbury 2001: 393). Language exposure and practice may be perceived as valuable, given that language learning in China often means learning about English, in Chinese. Untrained native speakers may also serve to make up teacher numbers: institutional demand for English teachers is high, in part due to the curriculum requirement to teach English at all levels of education from grade three through to university, and China lacks teachers (Hu 2005b).

The native speaker fallacy may also be more pronounced in transmission educational cultures, where content knowledge as opposed to pedagogy may be perceived to be the primary knowledge-base of a teacher and where local teachers are evaluated primarily on their language competence (Andrews 2003). ELT-untrained but otherwise educated native English speakers may be wrongly assumed to have a declarative knowledge of English, as Chinese graduates are schooled in a declarative knowledge of their own language.

This confusion results in the current situation, where an excerpt from a Chinese university teaching job advertisement reads as follows:


Education: Does not matter. However, a University/College degree is desired. TEFL/TESL/TESOL certificate does not matter however one of them is desired.

(ESL China 2008)

Sadly, this may be indicative of the general standard of China’s foreign teachers, and although some foreign teachers may be highly ELT-qualified and experienced, plenty are not. Mantle and Li (2006) report on research carried out among 45 foreign English language teachers at ten universities in Dalian, northern China, in which they found that almost half the respondents had no ELT-specific training at all, but only BA degrees in non-ELT subjects. In the same vein, Watkins (2006) describes the difficulty of recruiting qualified, professional foreign teachers in China.

Thus, although data is unavailable as to average qualification-levels, it can be argued (e.g. by Watkins 2006) that most foreign teachers currently working in China would not be considered professionally prepared elsewhere. As both a cause and an effect, ‘there lingers the idea that any backpacker who is fit for nothing else can become an English teacher’ (Matei and Medgyes 2003: 74). Some ELT providers, such as Hess, a chain of ‘buxiban’ language schools in Taiwan (Hess 2006–2009), manage the problem of untrained teachers by providing in-house training and full lesson plans and all materials for every lesson. This allows for the hiring of sufficient numbers of native ‘teachers’.

Teachers’ motivations

Individuals’ reasons for teaching English in China seem to vary enormously. Some research has been undertaken into the motivations of various types of Western temporary migrant workers and long-term, long-haul travellers in developing countries, including English teachers. These motivations can be categorized as: ‘seeing the world’, ‘saving the world’, ‘hiding from the world’, and ‘becoming worldly’ (Hannam and Ateljevic 2008; Inkson and Myers 2003; Maoz 2007; Obenour 2004; G. Richards and Wilson 2004a, 2004b; Simpson 2004; Tams and Arthur 2007; Teo and Leong 2006; Van t’ Kloosteret al. 2008).

‘Seeing the world’ is related to tourism, and English teachers may straddle the divide between expatriates and ‘gap-year’ sojourners or backpacker tourists. Indeed, the Lonely Planet guide to China recommends the following:

Go East, young man. With its booming economy, China offers considerable scope for travellers looking for work. Teaching English can be particularly lucrative.

(Harper et al. 2007: 955).

While teaching is different from travelling, sojourners’ motivations may be similar. Simpson (2004, 2005) studied unskilled Western volunteer-tourists in Peru and Malawi and found that her participants’ motivation was to ‘engage in a variety of


work, travel and volunteer practices not previously available to them’ (2004: 681); this is similar to backpackers’ motivations identified by G. Richards and Wilson (2004b) and Hannam and Ateljevic (2008).

A Google search for ‘teaching English overseas’ returns over 68 million hits, and confirms that recruiters and employers may frame their recruitment of foreign teachers within a ‘teach and travel’ discourse. The first few pages that resulted from this search included headlines as follows:

• The travel portal for those who seek jobs teaching English overseas• Teach Abroad! Start your adventure teaching English overseas. Teach ESL

abroad in Korea, China, Taiwan.• Teaching English has long been a way for travellers to earn extra cash while

travelling.• Whether taking a year out or financing global travels, teaching English

abroad gives you the perfect opportunity to experience different cultures, enjoy unforgettable moments and make lifelong friends.

• Native speakers wanted to teach English overseas! Get paid to travel around the world & help people change their lives for the better.

• Teaching English overseas is a life-changing experience, giving you the rare opportunity to immerse yourself in a foreign culture.

• Just finished school or between jobs? Not sure where to look for a job or haven’t even started looking yet? Looking for an exciting opportunity to work, travel and try new experiences?

(Google Inc. 2009)

Thus, for young Westerners, a ‘gap year’ teaching English in China may be less to do with English teaching or even China, and more connected with ‘seeing the world’ on an extended working holiday.

This would help explain:

[T]he behaviour of the majority of Westerners in Taiwan who are recent college graduates passing through Taipei for a year or two and are quite happily embracing the hedonistic identity that has been thrust upon them.

(Moskowitz 2008: 330)

Moskowitz researched Westerners’ sexual behaviours and the construction of Western masculinities in Taipei, and sex tourism may be a motivation for some Western men teaching in China; this phenomenon has been reported in the media (e.g. International Herald Tribune 2006). There are echoes in this motivation type of the European Grand Tour of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, which was ‘largely an excuse for the sons of the rich to go drinking and whoring’ (Centore 2004: 96).

Like backpacker tourism, ‘saving the world’ is one of the discourses among foreign teachers. This motivation type, of ‘helping’, carries overtones of the ‘White man’s burden’, in which imperialism was justified as a noble purpose in


which Western expertise could help lift non-Western peoples out of poverty and ignorance. Simpson (2005) describes the development-work discourses of gap-year participants (177) and, for participants, having worked in a country rather than having simply been a tourist there may also confer the status of a more ‘authentic’ aid-work experience. This ‘voluntourism’ motivation may help explain the use by some ELT recruiters, cited above, of discourses like ‘help people change their lives for the better’ (Google Inc. 2009). Oakes (2006) found this to be a motivation among American tourists in China, and describes tourists’ self-image of ‘themselves as aid workers more than tourists (ibid.: 234). Sojourning teachers may therefore appropriate a ‘development’ discourse.

Of course, the hiring of unskilled Westerners in jobs that would normally require qualifications may be of questionable ethical standing. This is critiqued, in the context of Ghana, as:

[A] neo-colonial phenomenon, where young Westerners are seen to be racially and culturally superior to people in developing countries and are therefore seen to be suitable teachers regardless of experience or qualifications.

(Roberts 2004: 21)

Simpson critiques the power relations that this sets up among individuals; power relations are discussed further in Chapter 3.

Volunteer-tourisms, such as the gap year, position the traveller socially … in the position of ‘expert’, or at least as knowledgeable by locating them in roles such as teachers … So the traveller is not only able to experiment with a new identity, but they are also presented to their hosts as ‘experts’. … This process is particularly evident in third world tourisms, which by their nature function through, and within, significant inequalities of power.

(2005: 51)

The construct of ‘volunteer’ is complex: there is a continuum from highly skilled professionals responding to stakeholder-perceived needs, often for minimal remuneration (e.g. medical doctors in war zones) to unskilled people looking to experience adventure by ‘helping’ the developing world (e.g. backpackers irritating turtles in the name of reef protection in Central America). English teachers qualified by university degrees, short ELT courses, and native English language skills fall between these extremes.

The motivations of ‘seeing the world’ and ‘saving the world’ are similar in that they take as their basic premise the assumption of the right, for Westerners, to spend extended periods of time in developing countries for their own reasons, whether framing this as enjoying themselves on holiday or as philanthropically ‘helping’. The same basic premise underlies those ‘hiding from the world’ or ‘becoming worldly’.

There are some people for whom teaching English in China, with its low qualification expectations and relatively lucrative rewards, presents opportunities


unavailable at home. These may be lifestyle improvements such as the status of a teaching job and the relatively high salary offered to foreign teachers. The title of Jane Gardam’s (2004) novel Old Filth refers to the ‘FILTH’ phenomenon that describes opportunistically motivated expatriates: ‘Failed In London? Try Hong Kong’.

But teaching in China may also offer instrumental motivation of an indirect type: the opportunity to acquire skills with which to return home or to move into other roles in the same or another transnational location. Spending time abroad may confer an intangible ‘worldliness’ and/or more concrete skills such as language skills with which to construct identities and build future careers. Neumann (1992: 179) writes, of this motivation, that:

[J]ourneys become the opportunity to acquire experiences that become the basis for the production of identity and are revealed from narratives that emerge from travel experiences.

Similarly, Vance (2005: 381) describes the strategic use of time spent in a transnational context in order to build a business career. He advises ‘teaching English or taking other temporary employment to provide economic support until longer-term business employment can be secured’.

While Roberts (2004: 29) critiques the use of developing countries as a training ground for young Western skill-seekers and thrill-seekers, he writes:

In the contemporary Western employment market, higher order skills such as intercultural communication, leadership, team working, intuition, innovation, creativity, problem solving, self-assurance and adaptability are becoming just as important as academic qualifications. It is clear that overseas volunteer work is an excellent way for people at the beginning of their careers and seeking promotion to develop higher order skills.

But we might ask whether these skills are in fact developed through a period of overseas work; the present study suggests otherwise. Simpson (2005: 214) questions the extent to which intercultural competence is actually developed, citing the case of one of her participants who asserted that many poor Peruvians do not have a television, but that this ‘doesn’t bother them’. Simpson tells us that many local people in her research site do, in fact, have televisions but that:

[The participant] is left merely asserting the assumptions with which she had arrived [in the context]. Only now, with the added authority of ‘experience’ … reinforcing rather than challenging what she ‘knows’ about the world and the encountered Other. … [A] rhetoric of ‘poor-but-happy’ is turned into an experience of ‘poor-but-happy’.

A transnational sojourn may therefore serve to reify existing, albeit wrong, paradigms and allow for these to gain the credibility of first-hand experience.


There is little agreement in the literature as to the effects of overseas experience and the extent to which it confers anticipated ‘higher order skills’ and concomitant ‘worldliness’. It may be that participants’ own motivations and their willingness to question what they already ‘know’ determine the extent to which they either challenge received ideas or instead head home after their transnational sojourn with pre-existing notions reinforced and supported by the dubious ‘authority’ of experience. Desforges (2000: 929) writes that ‘experience of the world is produced rather than simply acquired’ (italics in original). This means that foreign teachers in China ‘consume’ the experience differently depending on the selves and identities they bring with them and the extent to which they are open to learning about/from the local culture.

Teaching ‘culture’ as part of ELT

The objective of higher order skills acquisition, including the development of intercultural competence, may also be an aim for the students, and this section examines the ubiquity of ‘language and culture’ as a curriculum goal in ELT. There is a substantial literature on the development of intercultural competence as part of English teaching and it is not within the scope of this project to review it comprehensively. Useful reviews are provided by Paige, Jorstad, Siaya, Klein, and Colby (1999) and, more recently, Young, Sachdev, and Seedhouse (2009). In the meantime, I provide a brief outline of the nature of intercultural competence and a short discussion of how it might be acquired and taught.

To explain intercultural competence it is useful to begin with an example of where it may break down. One source of intercultural miscommunication is the misreading of seemingly familiar signs that signify different underlying meanings. These are ‘well-meaning clashes’ (Ting-Toomey 1999), in which speaker A says X, meaning X1, but listener B interprets X to mean X2. Misunderstandings ensue. So awareness of possible misunderstandings is a key element to intercultural competence. In most accounts there are three components to be developed in the acquisition of intercultural skills. The first is sensitivity and motivation to empathize across cultures (the affective domain). The second is skills in interacting appropriately and effectively with people from different cultures (the behavioural domain). The third component is knowledge about cultures, cultural differences, and possible cultural misreadings (the cognitive domain) (Bodycott and Walker 2000; Brick 2004; Byram 2006; Dogancay-Aktuna 2005; Ehrenreich 2007; Gudykunst 2003; Kurtyka 2007; Lin 2006; Murphy-Lejeune 2007; Signorini et al. 2009; Song and Fu 2004; Sparrow 2008; Ting-Toomey 1999; Ward et al. 2001; Wiseman 2003).

But this approach ignores an important issue: no culture exists in a vacuum of history, politics, and power. When an American and an Iraqi meet, for example, each brings expectations about the other in terms of prior ‘knowledge’ of their own and their interlocutor’s culture and country, and its status relative to their own. There may be mistrust, resentment, and prejudice. Intercultural relationships


are steeped in inequalities. This may affect communications between individuals, who may infuse communications with power dynamics (Crawford and McLaren 2003; Kelly 2008; J. N. Martin and Nakayama 1999, 2004, 2008).

So intercultural competence is a question not only of developing positive affect, suitable behaviours, and cultural knowledge. It is also necessary to engage with existing attitudes towards and ‘knowledge’ about other peoples and cultures. As discussed in Chapter 3, these attitudes and ‘knowledges’ may derive from Orientalist/Occidentalist constructions about foreign Others. William Kelly (2008) provides an example of his own early power-infused ‘miscommunication’ as an English teacher in Japan:

White American arrogance was greatly in evidence at that time [1974]. … [A] student [of mine] asked me to go with him to Kamakura [a tourist city 50km from Tokyo, where Kelly was teaching]. I replied that I had already been to Kamakura and wanted to go somewhere new. My casual dismissal of this invitation could be interpreted as unawareness of the importance of face saving in Japan, that is, in terms of cultural ignorance. But my behaviour could also be interpreted as the kind of arrogance often displayed by those occupying dominant positions within a colonial-type relationship. It could be interpreted in terms of my enjoying power and privilege rather than as a failure to acknowledge cultural differences.

(ibid.: 269)

Kelly therefore critiques the ‘cultural differences’ model of framing intercultural communication skills, as it is deficient in explaining the problem in cases where a larger discourse of power infuses the miscommunication.

So the task of intercultural competence development comprises development/learning in four areas: motivation/sensitivity towards other cultures, behavioural skills, knowledge (which can be further subdivided into knowledge about culture in general, knowledge about one’s own culture, and knowledge about an/other specific culture/s), and a problematizing of one’s pre-existing attitudes towards other groups and their relative power relations.

But the information above, on what needs to be learned, does not explain how intercultural competence might be acquired or taught. Young, Sachdev, and Seedhouse (2009) review intercultural competence teaching as part of English language teaching. They critique the superficial use of culture as context rather than content, concluding that ‘culture is not approached in the classroom in a principled, active and engaged manner and … this lack of engagement may have a detrimental effect on learning’ (149). This ‘food and festivals’ view of culture is common in ELT textbooks, and Holliday (2009) critiques ‘traditional attempts at multiculturalism which have ritualised the sharing of superficial national and ethnic cultural exotica’ (ibid.:146).

So it seems we are not teaching culture well, and that much classroom teaching of culture is superficial. This may be because teaching culture is complex, and because teachers may lack intercultural competence, cultural knowledge, and


skills with which to develop students’ intercultural competence. Culture may also be marginalized in curriculum documents:

College English is not only a language course that provides basic knowledge about English, but also a capacity enhancement course that helps students to broaden their horizons and learn about different cultures in the world. … When designing College English courses, therefore, it is necessary to take into full consideration the development of students’ cultural capacity and the teaching of knowledge about different cultures in the world.

(Chinese Ministry of Education 2007: 32)

From this excerpt, which is the only mention of culture in the 235-page document, there is an implicit model of the ‘cultural differences’ approach to intercultural teaching, critiqued by Kelly (2008) above. No mention is made of learning about culture in general or of having students investigate their own culture(s) so as to understand their own cultural assumptions better. Nor is mention made of problematizing historico-political power dynamics, at least not in English classes. Instead, the objective appears to be primarily the transmission of facts about ‘different cultures’, presumably essentialistic national cultures, in the Hofstedian sense. This invites an approach to culture in which simplified cultures are learned about, having first been characterized for teaching purposes. This is paradoxical, and Norton and Gao (2008: 116) explain the problem:

To enhance intercultural understanding, a characterization of cultural differences seems indispensible. The very categorization and characterization, however, may reify differences and perpetuate cultural stereotypes, which will paradoxically hinder intercultural understanding.

How, then, are we to approach the teaching of intercultural competence?Dogancay-Aktuna (2005) advocates culture teaching as cross-cultural

awareness raising and the development of tools for exploring cultures, plural, rather than the learning of facts. Similarly, Risager (2006) prioritizes students’ developing interculturality and intercultural awareness. There is therefore a need to emphasize skills training (behaviour), motivation to overcome cultural barriers (affect) and knowledge about our own cultural assumptions including our own ‘lenses’ through which we perceive the world (cognition). On this last point, Liddicoat (2004: 300) writes of the importance of an ‘intercultural perspective in which the native culture and language are made apparent alongside the target culture’. We must avoid, then, trying to teach a necessarily simplistic ‘knowledge about different cultures in the world’, as the curriculum puts it.

This model of culture teaching, including awareness raising about one’s own culture and about culture(s) more generally, has resulted in Bhabha (1990) and Kramsch (1993: 9) conceptualizing interculturality as a negotiated ‘third space’ between an individual’s own culture and the target culture. This is somewhat problematic given English’s role as a lingua franca, as the ‘target’ culture may


not be a native English speaking culture but may instead be the culture of another non-native interlocutor. This discredits attempts to teach prefabricated ‘third space’ skills and instead points to the need to develop intercultural competence and the negotiation skills to begin each intercultural encounter anew. This means that the challenge of intercultural language teaching is not merely to confer upon learners the information and skills they need to operate interculturally in a single ‘third space’ between, for example, essentialized American and Chinese cultures, but also to develop intercultural skills that can be adapted for interactions with people from different cultures.

This is a tall order for language teachers, let alone minimally trained ‘teachers’. The following section therefore presents a framework for analysing English language teachers’ skills and knowledge and for comparing the extent to which different training types prepare teachers to be effective.

Assessing English language teacher expertise

Pasternak and Bailey (2004: 158) define an English language teacher’s knowledge base as comprising firstly ‘knowledge about’ and, secondly, the ‘ability to do’ in the following three areas: the target language (i.e. both a declarative knowledge about the language’s systems and proficiency in using the language), teaching language (i.e. knowing about language teaching and being able to teach the target language in contextually-appropriate ways), and the target culture (i.e. knowing both about and how to operate in the target-language culture). This framework is comparable to other conceptualizations of English language teacher competencies (Andrews 2003; Freeman and Johnson 1998; K. Johnson 2005; Shin and Kellogg 2007; Tsui 2003; Watzke 2007).

Against these criteria it is very clear that ELT-unqualified native English speakers are not professionally prepared to teach English language. However, it is less clear whether novice teachers holding certificate-level ELT qualifications can be considered effective in a Chinese university context, particularly as foreign teachers in tertiary contexts are often expected to teach stand-alone ‘oral English’. This is the topic of Chapter 10.

Accredited ELT Certificate qualifications include University of Cambridge CELTA and Trinity College London. These are both 120-hour face-to-face courses comprising six to eight hours’ assessed teaching with groups of real students (as opposed to peer-teaching or teaching individuals one-to-one) within a 40-hour teaching practice component that includes trainees observing experienced teachers and their peers. Only accredited, standardized trainers at approved centres teach the courses (including practical teaching supervision and assessment), and the awarding bodies moderate each trainee’s work. These two courses cover similar ground, focusing on language awareness and a ‘weak’ communicative language teaching methodology. Numerous other ELT courses also exist and many follow the same format as those described above; these include the EF Certificate in TEFL and the Teach International TEFL Certificate. In addition, there are many shorter, often online, courses such as the


one-weekend i-to-i TEFL Certificate or the 40-hour online-only TEFL Online Certificate. These generally offer only peer teaching or no practical component at all, and trainers’ professional qualifications, skills, and experience may be limited.

CELTA/CertTESOL courses teach a ‘weak’ communicative approach, in which there is explicit focus on language input/correction as well as on macro-skills development and language acquisition through meaning-based output. Teaching practice lessons may comprise, for example, ‘listening and grammar’, with listening skills development leading onto a grammar point drawn from a listening text, and then, perhaps, onto students’ responses to the text either as an oral or written fluency lesson stage. ‘Target language’ points are described using traditional grammar labels. Target language may be drawn from texts, taught via ‘test-teach-test’ (used to diagnose students’ existing knowledge and address knowledge gaps), or taught via situational presentations (Harmer 2007; Scrivener 2005; Thornbury 1999).

The last of these, also called presentation-practice-production (PPP), comprises three stages:

• Presentation – the target language point is clarified through the setting up of a situation (e.g. describing life experiences);

• Practice – learners undertake ‘controlled practice’ focusing on manipulation of the target language structure either in isolation or in comparison to another structure (e.g. present perfect versus past simple for describing single events versus accumulated experience);

• Production – learners undertake a ‘freer practice’ activity in which the aim is for them to incorporate the new structure into meaning-based oral fluency development (e.g. talking to a peer about their own life experiences, ideally but not necessarily integrating the present perfect, contrasting this to past simple to ask and answer about specific details of these experiences, e.g. ‘I have been to Guangzhou, I went in 2007.’)

This model is based on the assumption that controlled and then freer practice results in language learners incorporating new items. This may be of questionable validity (R. Ellis 2002), but PPP is still a lesson structure that is commonly taught on CELTA-type courses (Kanowski 2004).

However, knowing how to teach a PPP lesson, or any other type, in one context may not equip a novice teacher to, firstly, know how to teach the same lesson type in a different context or, secondly, know enough about teaching in order to adapt the lesson type as necessary. Indeed, Ferguson and Donno (2003) describe certificate courses as providing repertoire of practical classroom behaviours, including lesson structures. But such teachers may struggle to adapt these to different educational contexts. Dooley (2001: 242) writes that, for China, ‘what is required is teacher preparation that redresses sociological blindness towards the cultural particularity of local pedagogical contexts’. Clearly this cannot be addressed on one-size-fits-all certificate programs that purport to train teachers to


teach anywhere, free of contextual factors such as different models of ELT (e.g. where oral English stands alone) and students’ various cultures of learning.

In an ideal world, then, perhaps all foreign teachers would hold advanced diplomas/degrees in ELT, and would have had substantial, assessed teaching practice and teaching experience before going to China. This said, Boyle (2000: 154) concludes that even qualified, experienced foreign teachers may struggle in China, and, comparing training types, Kanowski (2004: 22) found that some teachers valued CELTA over MA TESOL courses that were seen as ‘too theoretical’. Further, as most Western English language teachers pay for their own training (Ferguson and Donno 2003) and as demand for foreign teachers already outstrips supply in China, this is unrealistic.

In addition, certificate-level qualifications are considered sufficient for entry-level teachers to work in accredited language schools in the UK and Australia (British Council 2007; NEAS 2005) and in many other contexts (e.g. British Council 2008b; International House World Organisation 2008), because such teachers will be supported in these contexts, as a condition of workplace accreditation, by properly-ELT-qualified academic managers. So while CELTA-type courses confer a skill set that matches some of the criteria in Pasternak and Bailey’s (2004) framework, professional support is also necessary for such teachers to be able to adapt their practice.

Regardless of the teacher education type and amount, measuring teacher effectiveness, and teachers’ underlying expertise, is notoriously tricky and there is no litmus paper with which to test for teacher quality (Munoz and Chang 2007; Sowden 2007; Tsui 2003). One might assess teachers’ qualification levels and types as a measure of effectiveness, but the correlation between credentials and effectiveness relies on inference between constructs. One might pre and post-test students’ proficiency to determine progress but again this relies on inference: students’ improvement, or lack thereof, may be attributable to other factors than teacher effectiveness. So one might ask students to appraise their teachers, although this measures different constructs again, including students’ likes and preferences.

Students’ preferences may differ from what teachers might consider to be ‘effective’ teaching, and Zhang and Watkins (2007) found that Chinese university students highly valued teachers’ appearance, manners, personality, and attitudes towards their students. A similarly nebulous criterion of teacher success is when students praise lessons that are ‘fun’. Ormrod (2000: 601) critiques the use of ‘excitement and entertainment’ in education for their own sake, and counsels teachers to prioritize instructional goals over fun. However, in a study of ‘edutainment’ software, Okan (2003) examined the ‘backwash’ of student preferences on teachers’ practice:

[E]quating learning with fun suggests that if students are not enjoying themselves they are not learning. … [S]uch an approach doesn’t promote learning; it trivializes the learning process. Inevitably, when faced with such a change in student attitudes toward learning many teachers rush to … satisfy


students’ and parents’ demands for more enjoyable and less serious learning situations.

(ibid.: 258)

Okan argues that while learning should be mentally engaging, it may also require cognitive and emotional effort. So while fun and learning are not mutually exclusive, we must evaluate the extent to which teachers are being asked to provide ‘tainment’ as opposed to ‘edu’ (262). Okan concludes that while fun is not a bad thing, it should not be the focus. Instead, educational technology must be well grounded in pedagogy as a means to learning and not as an end in itself. This is also Senior’s (2006: 183–185) argument. She identifies and critiques the ‘party games syndrome’, in which teachers conflate students having fun with students learning:

[English] [l]anguage teachers vary in the degree to which they make the assumption that there is a positive correlation between fun and learning … Some go a step further, viewing enjoyment as an end in itself. Teachers in the latter category are likely to be those who are relatively new to the profession, who have received minimal training and who do not regard language teaching seriously or as a lifelong career. … In language schools the word often gets around that certain teachers operate primarily as ‘entertainers’ or ‘babysitters’.

(ibid.: 184)

Thus students’ preferences may not be a valid measure of teachers’ effectiveness, as their implicit evaluation criteria may value other constructs, like fun.

So the measurement of teacher effectiveness is highly problematic. However, there is a shortage of English language teachers in China. As a result, the problem for institutions may not be how to measure English teachers’ effectiveness but how to find and retain enough people who can make an attempt at doing the job.

Foreign teachers’ experiences in China

I say ‘make an attempt’, because, unfortunately, even well-qualified Western teachers may struggle in Chinese classrooms. There are many reports in the literature of difficulties encountered when teachers try to import, or adapt, CLT. This is somewhat ironic, as the very reason the foreign experts are ostensibly in China is for the very ‘technology’ that they bring. However, mismatched cultures of learning may cause misunderstandings as teachers and students may interpret the other’s behaviours through a framework of their own cultural positioning and expected norms.

Dow and Ouyang (2004) report the synthesized case study of Maria, an MA ELT-qualified American teacher in a mainland Chinese university, who wonders ‘why do they hire me for my expertise in CLT and then criticize me for having implemented it in reality?’ (8). The teacher described appears to be a skilled ELT professional, who:


[U]sed all kinds of CLT methodology to teach her course. She encouraged the class to ask lots of questions, listen to each other and create information gaps so that pairs could exchange ideas, and she always ensured that she was positive, supportive and humanistic towards her students, even when they made errors. Together they did a lot of speed-reading, skimming and scanning, emphasising the goal and efficiency of their reading methods and learning to make correct inferences from textual clues. Maria introduced process writing to the class, peer feedback and peer correction. Maria always stressed that foreign language learning should be an active process of enquiry into knowledge and truth, rather than a slavishly accurate, but passive reception of the linguistic forms.

(ibid.)

All of this description fits well into teacher competencies frameworks given elsewhere (e.g. Freeman and Johnson 1998; Pasternak and Bailey 2004; Thaine 2004) and would seem to correspond well with effective teaching as understood on Western ELT preparation programs. However, Dow and Ouyang (2004) describe Maria’s students’ rejection of her teaching approach, and the poor student feedback she receives which ultimately results in her contract not being renewed. Clearly there is a disparity here between Maria’s CLT approach and the requirements of the Chinese ELT context in which she worked, and M. Li (1999: 1) writes that ‘Many expatriate teachers go to China in high spirits but return home disappointed, resentful and hostile’ as a result of the issue of conflicting expectations.

Dooley (2001) writes of the mismatch between students’ and teachers’ different perceptions and Boyle (2000: 154) concludes that:

[T]hose who wish to work as foreign teachers of English in China must take every opportunity to educate themselves into a historical and cultural awareness, and a social sensitivity to the Chinese culture.

M. Li (1999) also argues for flexibility and intercultural sensitivity in Western teachers. Degen and Absalom (1998: 127–129) make this more specific: problematizing, flexibility, sensitivity, and adaptation can best be achieved by Western teachers if they analyse the possibilities and constraints in their context and ‘attempt to provide some tangible evidence of advantages that would result to Chinese educators and students by their adoption of specific Western approaches’ (127).

Unfortunately, it appears that Chinese students may nevertheless judge Western teachers as ineffective. M. Li (1999), Cortazzi and Jin (1999), and Zhao and Grimshaw (2004) all deal with Chinese students’ views of Western teachers and are in broad agreement. M. Li (1999: 1) writes:

Chinese students view the teaching styles of expatriate teachers as conducive to creating an authentic learning atmosphere and providing a rare opportunity


for interactions with native speakers. However, at the same time, they [the students] regard the teacher as rigid, dogmatic, incoherent, purposeless and irresponsible, aiming at low-level teaching objectives only.

There are clearly misunderstandings here. Zhao and Grimshaw (2004: 28) analyse these as due to a:

[G]ap between language learning beliefs in the language learning process … The teaching approaches that expatriate teachers value, individual participation and communication, may not be understood by the class administrators and learners in China, because they believe language is transmitted to students rather than acquired through practice and use of it.

Cortazzi and Jin (1999) broadly agree, writing that Western teachers tend to be viewed as less educationally capable than Chinese teachers, ‘perhaps because they stress pair and group discussion instead of teaching the students themselves’ (216).

Conclusion

This chapter has reviewed eclectic and wide-ranging research on the edges of the literature gap in which the present study is located. While individuals’ cultures are not deterministically linked to their country of origin, Chinese students and Western teachers are acculturated by different assumptive models, and these are discussed further in Chapters 3 and 6. For now, though, I have reviewed the debates on cultures of learning and localized approaches to ELT. These allow for a more nuanced understanding of the teachers’ experiences in this study. In particular, the notion of context-appropriate ELT methodologies has been reviewed as this appears to be an area in which the teachers, trained on one-size-fits-all short courses in English language teaching, may struggle to adapt their practice to ‘fit’ the context.

3 Theorizing transnationals in China

This book is a critical ethnography and, in this chapter, I consider what this means. I also explore the theoretical constructs that underlie the narratives that follow. From 1949 until the early 1980s, there were few non-Chinese in China (Brady 2000); now, Western brands, bars, and backpackers are everywhere. This is nowhere more true than Shanghai, which aims to be mainland China’s most outward-looking city (Farrer 2005). But China has a complex relationship with outsiders, situated in its own recent ‘century of humiliation’ and the period during which it was closed to the world. Westerners may therefore not have to look hard to find traces of China’s love–hate ambivalence towards the West. This chapter, therefore, explores the socio-political background to the experiences of transnational ‘Westerners’ in China, including those teaching English. These are complex and there is a need for theoretical frameworks with which to make sense of what is going on.

Critical ethnography and ELT

There are distinct silos of research and theory in ELT and in order to situate the present critical ethnography it is necessary to summarize the various theoretical and epistemological positions. Broadly, these are: cognitive, socio-cultural, and critical perspectives (Tollefson 2011). Much of the research into Second Language Acquisition (SLA) is primarily cognitive, focusing on ‘discoveries’ about how languages are learned. Within this tradition sits work such as Krashen’s Monitor hypothesis, Swain’s notion of ‘pushed output’, and Selinker’s model of interlanguage. Variables studied in cognitive SLA research are primarily individual in nature, and include age, motivation, personality, aptitude, and learning strategies. The priority is causality: why do some learners learn while others do not? What ‘works’? Experiments are conducted, ‘technologies’ are developed (Tudor 2001) and ‘outcomes’ are ‘proven’. The focus is pragmatism.

However, and as discussed in Chapter 2, what ‘works’ in one context may well not work in another. Sociocultural research therefore goes beyond the individual, considering the contexts of language learning (Lantolf 2006). This means researching, for example, the nature of peer interactions, ‘scaffolding’ the Zone of Proximal Development (after Vygotsky), or classroom discourse. In contrast to


SLA research, here the focus is on learners in contexts: classrooms and communities. But the priority is still causality: how can language learning be more effective or more efficient?

But none of this explains why, for example, Niño-Murcia (2003) found socio-economic status to be a predictor of both English language proficiency and attitudes to English and English teaching in Peru. Nor does it explain why Canagarajah (1993) found that his Tamil students’ cultural and political resistance to his teaching methods and materials affected their learning. Cognitive and socio-cultural approaches similarly leave unexplained William Kelly’s (2008) and Adrian Holliday’s (2005) own youthful arrogance as Western English language teachers overseas. Such questions of macro and micro-level power relations and their effects on language education are the domain of critical perspectives.

To be ‘critical’ is to prioritize interrogating power relations. This goes beyond both description and interpretivism, seeking to describe what is happening, to explain it in terms of what it means to the participants themselves, and also to problematize the (inevitable, inherent) power relations and resultant-constitutive discourses in any context so as to explain at a much deeper level ‘what is going on’. Critical research engages with ‘ideological state apparatuses’ (Althusser 1971, cited by Tollefson 2011: 803) that is, hegemonic power as it is produced, maintained, and reified through education, media and so on. This may mean, for example, rejecting the ‘linguistic imperialism’ (Canagarajah 1999; Phillipson 1992) of imported methodologies, exonormative models of ‘standard’ English, and/or native-speakerism (e.g. Holliday 2006; Jeon and Lee 2006; Kirkpatrick 2006). Or, at a more local level, it may mean interrogating the various, unequal forms of ‘capital’ with which learners arrive in education, so as to understand why ostensibly ‘equal opportunities’ do not produce equal results (Bourdieu 1986).

Pennycook (2001) distinguishes four stances towards critical applied linguistics: liberal ostrichism, anarcho-autonomy, emancipatory modernism, and problem-atizing practice. The first of these is ‘head in the sand’, the argument that we as linguists and language teachers should not concern ourselves with politics. Pennycook derides this stance as ‘hypocritical applied linguistics’ (after Widdowson), saying that a ‘bland egalitarianism … does not help us in framing questions of inequality, language, and power’ (33), as we cannot help but be positioned politically. The second position, attributed to Chomsky, is an odd bricolage of radical leftist politics and a curiously apolitical (cognitive-structural) approach to language. This approach, says Pennycook, offers little. The third stance, emancipatory modernism, offers more potential to critical applied linguistics as it:

[A]ims specifically to relate language study to leftist politics. … From this point of view, language is deeply political, and the goals of one’s work as a (critical) applied linguist are to uncover the operations by which the political nature of language is obscured and to reveal the political implications of language.

(ibid.: 36)

Theorizing transnationals in China 41

Broadly, this is the approach taken by Ruth Wodak, Norman Fairclough and others working in critical discourse analysis. It also frames Robert Phillipson’s book Linguistic Imperialism (1992), in which he critiques the dominance of English, its promotion by ‘Centre’ organizations like the British Council, and various tenets of the ELT industry including the idealization of monolingual teaching and native-speaker teachers (Pennycook 2001: 61–63; Tollefson 2011).

But this approach is flawed. The dichotomizing of oppressor/oppressed is problematic, particularly if framed mainly in (Marxist) terms of capitalist accumulation. This produces a deterministic and inflexible ‘structural materialism’ (Pennycook 2001: 92), that is, the a priori attribution of who belongs to which (primarily economic) group, which group has more power, and therefore which group then oppresses whom. Social identities as well as power and oppression are much more complex, and more context dependent, than a structural-deterministic model can cope with. To frame power in such terms, particularly when group membership is determined from the outside, is to engage in exactly the kind of deterministic essentialism that criticality ostensibly critiques.

In addition, it is highly patronizing to suggest that certain categories of people are ‘ideologically duped and need to have the veil of mystification lifted from them’ (ibid.: 40). In this sense, emancipatory modernism is itself imperialistic: it seeks to export its own paradigm and priorities to those it classes as ‘underdogs’ but fails to engage critically with its own status as a self-appointed categorizer and liberator. This is troublingly close to the kind of ‘discourse of political interference – a mandate for correcting and changing … the cultures of the East and the South’ for which Holliday (2009: 148) chides Hofstede (in Chapter 2).

A further issue is epistemological: in seeking to ‘uncover’ and ‘reveal’ the ‘obscured’ ‘nature’ of linguistic operations, emancipatory modernism implicitly accepts a positivistic epistemology in which ‘facts’ are seen as ‘out there’ to be discovered by ‘science’ (Pennycook 2001: 36–37). This is problematic because it ignores its own positionality: if ideology is produced by, and produces, power relations, we must also question the neutrality or of ‘science’ and of ostensibly objective ‘facts’. We must point our criticality at ourselves and our own knowledge status. It is not enough to claim that X oppresses Y; we must also ask, ‘and who is Z (or, indeed, X or Y) that perceives it so?’

Pennycook’s fourth, Foucauldian, stance (83), of ‘Problematizing Practice’, offers a much more useful type of (meta)criticality, and it is the framework that I use in the present study. The grammar of its name is telling: the gerund-noun, in contrast to the adjective-noun combination of the preceding three models, highlights that this is a model in action; it seeks to ‘do’ criticality as an on-going practice rather than establishing itself and its own particular paradigms as a new fixity. Thus, as with other forms of criticality:

[T]he questions have to do with the social, cultural, and historical location of the speaker. But rather than assuming that the speaker is already marginalized as a member of [a given group of people] and looking for signs of that marginalization in the speech, this approach seeks a broader understanding


of how multiple discourses may be in play at the same time. What kinds of discursive positions does the speaker take up? How does the speaker position herself or himself, and how may they also be positioned at different moments according to gendered and cultural positionings?

(Pennycook 2001: 44)

Pennycook rejects as overly simplistic and as primarily economic the Centre–Periphery model. He does not deny the on-going inequality between rich and poor countries but says it is ‘reductive to view global relations in these terms’ (62). If social identity and oppressor/oppressed status are accorded only (or even mainly) by macro-level groupings, people are denied agency, resistance, appropriation, hybridity, or movement (69–71). Instead, critical approaches must, themselves, be open to criticality and must guard against ‘the reductive analyses of social relations that they at times produce’ (65).

This means that a ‘Problematizing Practice’ strand of critical engagement needs to engage with complex and ‘messy’ cultures, hybridities, and multiple identities. While nationality does have an impact on individuals’ cultural identities, as discussed in Chapter 2, it is not the whole story (Holliday 2010). We cannot, therefore, ascribe ideological positionings and behaviours to categories of individuals without taking account of living, breathing people. A critical ethnography of ‘Western’ teachers of English in China, then, must not assume a priori either that individuals are motivated by neo-imperialism or that they are hapless dupes swept up in neo-colonial discourses such as that of ‘helping’. Either of these may, of course, be the case but, importantly, they may not. Similarly, we must not assume that their interactions with their students represent Centre–Periphery interactions, or Orientalism-infused interactions, or anything else. Pennycook (2001: 107) translates this into the practical step of ‘listening to those alarm bells that go off in your head every time you hear another dichotomy or essentialist category’. In framing this study, therefore, it is important not to essentialize the purposes, discourses, or effects of either the teachers or the students. So when the teachers in this study critique their students (as some do in Chapter 8) or when the students refuse to cooperate in class unless the Western teachers perform as ‘fun’ foreigners (as we see in Chapter 7), we must examine what is actually going on in the context rather than relying on imported categories and assumptions. This is ‘not an impossible relativism but rather a more complex, subtle, and reflexive position. To claim otherwise is to claim for oneself a position of knowledge that is somehow able to decide for others what is true’ (Pennycook 2001: 88).

Problematizing ‘postcolonial resistance’

Postcolonial theory is something of a misnomer. If colonialism is to be differentiated from postcolonialism by the presence, or not, of military, political, economic, and intellectual dominance of colonizer over colonized, then there is nothing ‘post’ about postcolonialism. The dominance continues. Postcolonial


theory holds that while the mechanisms may have changed, power remains in the hands of the dominant West; globalization is imperialism by another name. Postcolonialism, then, does not refer to the latest in a sequence of hegemonies after colonialism, but an engagement with and contestation of colonialism’s on-going discourses, power structures, and social hierarchies (Balagangadhara and Keppens 2009; Bhabha 1990, 1994, 1996; Bhabha and Mitchell 2005; Chance 2001; Kwek 2003; Said 1979, 1986, 1993; Spivak 1988a, 1988b, 1990; Teo and Leong 2006; Tickell 2001). I conceive ‘discourse’ in the Foucauldian sense:

‘[S]omething which produces something else (an utterance, a concept, an effect) rather than something which exists in and of itself and which can be analysed in isolation’ … Discourses are indelibly tied to power and knowledge and truth, but they do not either represent or obfuscate truth and knowledge in the interests of pregiven powers (as in the case of many versions of ideology); rather, they produce knowledge and truth[.]

(Pennycook 2001: 17 citing Mills 1997)

This is particularly important for cultural identity, and an important mechanism through which globalization has diminished the non-West is through a discourse that marginalizes the ‘third world’ (Escobar 1995). Thus even nations that were never colonized (e.g. Turkey) or were ‘semi-colonized’ (e.g. China) are marginalized by the globalized centre of cultural gravity that values ideas emanating from New York above those from New Delhi, or London over Lagos. Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk writes:

[T]he Third World writer [has a] sense of being exiled from the world’s literary centres. A Third World writer can choose to leave his own country and resettle—as [Peruvian novelist] Vargas Llosa did—in one of the cultural centres of Europe. But his sense of himself may not change, for a Third World writer’s ‘exile’ is not so much a matter of geography as a spiritual state, a sense of exclusion, of being a perpetual foreigner.

(2008: 168–169)

Postcolonialism therefore includes resistance to what Fanon (1967: 17) described as the ‘colonization of the consciousness’. This affects individuals’ and cultures’ notions of identity, particularly as much postcolonial identity work is undertaken in languages of the colonizers (e.g. Vargas Llosa writes in Spanish on Peruvian culture, politics, and identity). For this reason English language teaching has been critiqued as neo-colonial (Canagarajah 1999; Chew 1999; Karmani 2005; Phillipson 1992; Xu 2002).

So when students resist, is this not laudable postcolonial resistance in the face of (unwelcome) Western teachers and the (unwelcome) teaching of English? It might be. Again, though, it might not. This is where so-called ‘resistance’ may descend into the very essentialism and a priori assumptions that it decries in


imperialistic discourses. I do not deny that resistance exists: as Foucault (1980: 95) says, ‘Where there is power, there is resistance’, and Canagarajah’s (1993) nuanced, emic study amply illustrated how students may resist imported methods or materials. What I am concerned about is the tendency in some ‘critical’ ELT literature to construct student resistance as ‘postcolonial’ (and therefore good) and Western teachers as ‘imperialist’ (and therefore bad).

In shifting the Zeitgeist from imperialist hegemony to that of postcolonial resistance, might we simply shift the moral high ground and legitimize new forms of Othering? This would make racism and Othering acceptable for some people, provided that those undertaking it can claim that their own Othering is a form of resistance to imperialism. Michele Wallace (2004: 156–157), who herself is African-American (although this should not matter) is strongly critical of Professor bell hooks (1995), who wrote in Killing Rage, ‘I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder.’ The man’s crime was to have been allocated the first-class seat next to Professor hooks on a plane from New York, causing her female friend, who had been upgraded from economy, to have to return to her seat. To Professor hooks this symbolized institutional racism and sexism at the heart of American society. As Wallace says, this is nonsense. But as a Black woman, Wallace is perhaps in a stronger position to critique hooks than a White man would be. This is exactly the unthinking postcolonialism I am critiquing, in which there is a hierarchy of legitimizing disadvantage.

‘Periphery’ critiques of ‘the Centre’ may find more sympathy than Western Orientalism. But both can be dangerously reductive of individuals’ and cultures’ complexities. So although the framework of postcolonial theory is invaluable in understanding the behaviourally encoded attitudes and beliefs that may result from Western imperialism, we must also critically interrogate other Otherings and guard against a position that simply turns the hierarchy upside down and unthinkingly constructs brave local resisters to nasty Western imperialists. To do so would ignore other discourses of power and would serve to legitimize a new racism in which understanding comes second to post-colonial guilt.

Westerner-bashing has become something of a trope in ‘critical’ ELT. This is the position taken by, for example, Bright and Phan (2011) in a study of four Western teachers in Vietnam. The teachers are attributed ‘mindsets of colonialism’ (123) and ‘Eurocentric’ notions of development (126). They are depicted as benefitting from employment discrimination against non-White teachers (128–130) and as being ‘deterministic’ in their view of culture, which enables them to ‘ignore the agency of the students’ and ‘predict and speak for the students’ (124). This is one possible reading of the data, but it appears to be tainted by a priori beliefs about Westerners generally and native speaker teachers in particular. The data on which these claims are based is rather less extensive and rather more contestable than these damning conclusions would suggest; there are selective readings at work. Local parents complained about the Indonesian-heritage Australian teacher who was fired for not being White; the Western teacher simply recounts the story. Local teachers are often valued for understanding the students’ language difficulties but when a Western teacher says she is familiar with, and can


anticipate, students’ errors and difficulties with English, she is deterministically stereotyping and is disallowing the students agency. What I am critiquing, therefore, are instances where the flag of ‘postcolonial resistance’ may fly over other Otherings, of which, normally, we would be rightly critical.

Another variation on Westerner bashing is Holliday’s (2011) book, which is an example of the tendency of some Western ELT scholars to self-flagellate over their own positioning. Holliday’s work is a lucid, nuanced study and the articulation of a valuable ‘critical cosmopolitan’ approach that is consistent with Pennycook’s ‘problematizing practice’. But it is unfortunate that so many of his synthesized case-studies, most of which juxtapose Centre–Periphery people and perspectives, are so very one sided. As examples, we are introduced to (Centre) John and (Periphery) Kayvan (22–23). While John is boorish and ‘patronizing’, Kayvan is misunderstood, ‘too polite’, and his life is ‘more complicated than [John] could imagine’ (23). In cinematic terms, Kayvan has a ‘back story’ of business and family responsibilities whereas John is a flimsy caricature. We then meet Mark who is planning a trip to China (61–64). He feels frustration at what he perceives as organizational inefficiencies and he resists what he expects will be inescapable dawn-to-dusk hospitality, including group visits to a lake and the Great Wall. He consults with his Chinese colleague, Ming, and realizes that he has stereotyped the Chinese as collectivist and hierarchical, that this ‘can be traced to the way he positions himself regarding a non-Western Other, which is marked by the strong element of cultural deficiency’ (64), and that he was ’wrong on all counts’ (62). When he arrives in China he discovers that ‘Ming was right’, that ‘the lake’ is actually ‘no distance at all’, that the organizer is delighted not to have to take him to the Great Wall, and that she herself also expresses frustration at some of the inefficiencies. Again, the Western character gets it wrong: stereotyping, generalizing, not understanding. However, in showing that cultures and nationalities are not deterministic of behaviour and attitude, Holliday’s example elides an important reality: group tours, banquets, and out-of-hours hospitality do feature in many workplaces in China, particularly when hosting an international visitor. Mark’s imaginings are therefore not without basis in experience, whether his own of that of other visitors. The issue is that, as a Western character, his noticing and ‘knowing about’ of cultural patterns is derided as ignorant chauvinism and culturism, much as Bright and Phan’s (2011) Western teacher participants were scolded for their supposed ‘determinism’. In all these examples, if the Centre/Periphery characters were transposed and the very same critical frameworks applied, the texts would be easily dismissible as reductive, Orientalist Othering. Why, then, is the Othering of Westerners seemingly acceptable? It would appear that a dangerous double standard has crept into ‘critical’ ELT in which criticality may operate in one direction only.

Another example of this is the discussion of ‘native-speakerism’ (Holliday 2006). As discussed in Chapter 2, nativeness is highly political in ELT. There is a body of scholarship arguing for the different-but-equal, or, sometimes, superior, worthiness of ‘non-native speaker’ teachers (e.g. Arva and Medgyes 2000; Braine 1999; Llurda 2005; Mahboob 2004; Medgyes 1992; Tajino and Tajino 2000;


Ustunluoglu 2007). It has also been proposed – rightly, I think – that other teacher attributes are much more salient than ‘speakerhood’ (Franson and Holliday 2009). Additionally, of course, there is the problematic ‘non-’label: as the majority of English teachers acquired English after they acquired another language or languages, why should they be Othered as ‘non-’? More logical would be for the minority of English language teachers – people who learned English in early childhood – to be the ‘non’ group, the Others. But non-what? And this is where the debate turns sour.

Many authors have sought to replace the labels native and non-native with more acceptable labels to redress the implied Othering. While this effort is commendable, it is also problematic for two reasons. Firstly, the fault line of native and non-native remains; instead of rejecting the labels, we should, if we are to critique native-speakerism, reject the dichotomy. Secondly, the new labels are inaccurate. Pennycook (2008: 35) exemplifies this: ‘Native speaker English teachers travelled the world, able to market their monolingual skills above their bilingual counterparts’. Similarly, McKay (2011: 129) writes: ‘By hiring only native speakers and promoting native speaker competency, [a language learning complex in Korea] promotes a reality that is far different from the multilingual/multicultural Britain of today’. Jenkins (2006: 167) makes a similar point: ‘[native speaker models of English] are the result of a monolingual bias that is unable to comprehend the bilingual experience’. In all of these, nativeness is conflated with monolingualism. And these are very different constructs. Plenty of inner-circle ‘native’ speaker teachers of English are at least bilingual. Indeed, while there is some is debate as to the level of language proficiency needed for a person to ‘count’ as bilingual (McKay 2005; Pavlenko 2003), some native English speakers are much more convincingly ‘bilingual’ than some ‘bilingual’ teachers of English: L. Yu (2001) notes that some Chinese teachers of English are effectively monolingual and ‘basically teach English in Chinese’ (197).

This is why we need to identify, and to challenge, instances where Othering is ‘redressed’ simply by reversing its polarity. Othering is Othering, even if it is the ostensibly ‘powerful’ group that is Othered.This is particularly problematic when ‘Western’ criticality encounters another powerful discourse that uses constructed Others for its own purposes. One such discourse is Chinese nationalism. If criticality is to engage meaningfully with the present research context, therefore, there needs to be an awareness that the Western teachers are not necessarily the powerful group, that Orientalist discourses are not necessarily the most significant in the context, and that it is Westerners that may be Othered by Chinese discourses.

Occidentalism and discourses of difference

In order to understand Chinese nationalism it is necessary first to explore Edward Said’s work on Orientalism and also its counterpart: Occidentalism. Said (1979, 1986, 1993) writes that the ‘Orient’ is a cultural and political construction of the hegemonic occident’s imagination. The Orient is essentialized, exoticized, and marginalized; it is denied its own voice and is, instead, (mis)represented through


categorization, distortion, and reductionism. The Orient is thus Othered by hegemonic Western discourse, a process enabled by Western imperialism and postcolonial maintenance of Western hegemony. So Orientalism is the reduction and misrepresentation of the East by the West.

Orientalism may exaggerate putative positive as well as negative traits, and Su-lin Yu (2002) critiques Julia Kristeva’s (1977) book About Chinese Women as an Orientalist fantasy in which Kristeva romanticizes China as historically matrilineal and Mao-era Chinese women as ‘autonomous, active, and sovereign rather than passive and non-participating … They are culturally superior to Western women’ (S. Yu 2002: 6–7). Clearly, though, this is just as reductionist as negative Orientalism, as it constructs Chinese women as unchanging and homogenous. It may be a ‘nicer’ Orientalism, but it still disallows Chinese women individual variation, selves, and agency. Jing Yin (2008) makes a similar critique of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.

Occidentalism has been variously defined (see Conceison 2004: 40–67 for a review of this literature), but here I am taking it as the mirror image of Orientalism: the reduction and misrepresentation of the West by the East (Buruma and Margalit 2004). This plays out in myriad spheres. H. Li analyses the gendered appropriation of foreign models and images in Chinese advertising: Western women are pictured in ‘a life of luxury’, in commercials for underwear, skin whitening creams, and breast enhancement surgery, that:

[F]ocus on the part of the body that is considered beautiful, such as white skin, [and] large breasts, and display the female body in ways that would be considered inappropriate for a Chinese woman of proper upbringing.

(H. Li 2008: 1146)

Meanwhile, Western men are depicted as businessmen, and are associated with ‘technology, science, cars, and sports, and other themes that imply an authoritative position’ (ibid.). Thus, Westerners’ images are stripped of their individual identities and reduced to stereotypes. Similarly, and more negatively, Conceison (2004: 193) describes the ways in which Americans, regarded as prototypical Westerners, are gendered and caricatured in Chinese theatre as:

[S]elfish, sexist, dishonest, shrewd, aggressive, arrogant, cruel, hegemonic men, lusting after money, sex, and power … [and] sexually promiscuous, untrustworthy women who inevitably taint those with whom they come into contact.

Chinese Othering of Westerners ranges from positive, although still essentialist and reductionist, promotional images appealing to the ‘desirability of Westernness’ (H. Li 2008: 1146), through to barely-concealed contempt: Fei (1998: 113) writes that, ‘Ridiculing Westerners, especially Americans, is fashionable’.

This kind of essentialism stems from a deep-seated binary of Self and Other in Chinese discourses. While individual foreigners in China are usually well received,


few manage to be accepted into Chinese society as their ‘foreignness’ forever sets them apart. While foreigners may be accepted, they are always excepted. McDonald (2011:1, 54–55) writes:

A series of … ‘Great Walls of Discourse’ has over the years been erected between ‘the Chinese’ … and ‘the Foreigners’, who with the best will in the world will never succeed in bridging the awful gap of their inherent foreignness.

[…]

The Chinese habit of dividing the world into two parts – commonly expressed as guónèi ‘inside the country’ and guówài ‘outside the country’ – is a persuasive one, and is supported by a whole discourse[.]

Conceison (2004: 2) has similarly written on the dichotomizing of the Chinese Self and the foreign Other. She compares her experiences, as a White researcher in China, to Franz Fanon’s (1967: xvii) description of a White child noticing him, saying, ‘look, a Negro … Mama, see the Negro!’. Being pointed at, started at, and commented on is commonly reported by foreigners in China, including participants in this study. Conceison describes this as an ‘Othering’ that ‘triggers fragmentation, alienation, and objectification of the Self through the powerfully dominating gaze of the Other’ (3).

However, this does not seem to be a hostile gaze, at least not for White foreigners; Chinese racism towards Black foreigners is well documented (e.g. Coleman 2009; Dikotter 2008; M. D. Johnson 2007; Sautman 1994; Shen 2009). Conceison (2004: 3) writes:

[H]ow can one dare to compare the feelings of a contemporary Caucasian American female in China to those of a colonized African male in French Algeria? Isn’t the latter’s anger at such humiliation justified, while the former’s is oversensitive and naïve, perhaps even hysterical? What about the fact that when the White American or European is ‘Othered’ in China, it is as likely to be in the form of being pushed to the front of the line as to the back…?

There are many complexities here: is Othering acceptable if it is positive? Yu’s (2002) critique of Kristeva’s Orientalism suggests not. Is a woman’s response to Othering ‘hysterical’ while a man’s is ‘justified’? Feminist theory would critique such gendered constructions of acceptability. Is a postcolonial subject justifiably angry while the only legitimate feeling for White people is self-flagellation and guilt? This is where Pennycook’s ‘problematizing practice’ offers a more useful investigative tool than a postcolonial framework: while Conceison may be treated ‘better’ in China than Fanon was in colonized Algeria, both experienced essentialism, reduction, and Othering borne of the way their identities were determined and constructed through discourses of difference.


Using an ‘Other’ in the construction of the ‘Self’ is clearly not unique to this context, and in conversations from his 1960 travels around the USA John Steinbeck (1962: 143–144) shows how ‘Russians’ were discursively constructed as scapegoats in American identity work:

‘Hardly a day goes by somebody doesn’t take a belt at the Russians’ … I asked, ‘Anybody know any Russians around here?’ … [He] laughed. ‘Course not. That’s why they’re valuable. Nobody can find fault with you if you take out after the Russians. … Man has a fight with his wife, he belts the Russians.’‘You think then we might be using the Russians as an outlet for something else, for other things? … Maybe everybody needs Russians. I’ll bet even in Russia they need Russians. Maybe they call it Americans.’

Much as ‘Russians’ were a construction borne of socio-political perceptions in 1960s New England, Chinese constructions of foreigners serve to delineate the Self by drawing a line around where Selfhood meets Otherness. Nunan (2011: 179) describes this as: ‘Just as a fish is unaware of water (until it is removed from the stream), so we are unaware of our own culture until we rub up against another culture’. The comparative ‘culture’ need not be real, however. It may be invented for use in identity work, as with Steinbeck’s ‘Russians’.

One example of ‘foreignness’ being constructed for the purposes of self identity work is the use and positioning of foreign nationals on (party-state-controlled) television in China. These shows range from talent competitions to variety shows in which the role of foreign nationals is ‘performing [as] China-loving foreigners’ (Gorfinkel 2011: 288). Gorfinkel and Chubb (2012) describe their own experiences of appearing on these kinds of shows, analysing both the way they were depicted and also the underlying purposes of these constructions. Having foreigners dressed up in traditional Chinese clothes, speaking Chinese, experiencing Chinese cultural artifacts (supposedly for the first time), and singing Chinese songs (often children’s songs) works on a number of levels. First, it is a performance of ‘Chineseness’ that reflects how this is constructed in ‘patriotic education’; this is discussed in the next section. Second, it is a ‘showcase [of] foreigners’ love for China … contestants’ performances are frequently scripted to directly express attraction to, and love for, every aspect of China they encounter’ (ibid.: 21). This serves to validate Chineseness through foreigners’ approving gaze and to construct a China that is the envy of outsiders. Third, these shows infantilize foreigners, positioning them in subordinate positions looking up to and learning from China; this includes ‘scenes of them bowing to a Chinese master, often a child’ (ibid.: 22). Foreigners are asked to feign struggling to use chopsticks and are represented as ‘wide-eyed, comedic, and eager to learn and discover the wonders of a mysterious and alien, yet wise and patient, China’ (ibid.: 13). This constructs a Chinese-dominated ‘cosmopolitanism’ and the ‘metanarrative of China’s national revival to its former, exceptional, central status under the guidance of the [Communist Party]’ (ibid.: 18). Finally, these shows


construct Chineseness as unique and foreigners as essentially different. As an example, song lyrics on one show described ‘people with different skin and hair colours “curling their tongues” to speak the “elegant Chinese language” devised by the “clever Chinese people” (ibid.: 11). The message is that although foreigners may speak Chinese and appear on Chinese television they are irreducibly foreign and not Chinese, and that this is marked by race.

Race, in most Western and ELT literature, is a social construction (Coleman 2009; Curtis and Romney 2006; E. P. Johnson 2003; Kubota and Lin 2006 2009; Lott 1999; McDonald 2011: 214–216; Romney 2010; Root 2007). This is not to deny that human bodies are different from each other and that some of these differences have social salience. Rather, racial categories are a human invention that are not supported biologically; our genetic makeup does vary, but this variation does not reliably correspond with our racial categories (Kubota and Lin 2009: 2–3). One researcher/performance artist working on the social construction of race and identity has conducted a series of ‘Projects’ in which she performs different racialized identities:

After observing particular subcultures and ethnic groups, Nikki S. Lee adopts their general style and attitude through dress, gesture, and posture. … She then spends several weeks participating in the group’s routine activities and social events … From schoolgirl to senior citizen, punk to yuppie, rural White American to urban Hispanic, Lee’s personas traverse age, lifestyle, and culture. Part sociologist and part performance artist, Lee infiltrates these groups so convincingly that in individual photographs it is difficult to distinguish her from the crowd. However, when photographs from the projects are grouped together, it is Lee’s own Korean ethnicity, drawn like a thread through each scenario, which reveals her subtle ruse. … [W]hat convinces us that she belongs [is] her uncanny ability to strike the right pose. … Lee believes that ‘essentially life itself is a performance’.

(Museum of Contemporary Photography; Chicago 2005–2009)

As Lee’s photographs indicate, race is constructed as much by dress, gesture, posture, and ‘attitude’ (i.e. performance) as it is by phenotype.

However, in China, ideas and discourses about ‘race’, and specifically about the (Han) Chinese ‘race’, are rather different. Dikotter traces the construct, and uses, of ‘race’ in China. He describes how, in the face of early Western visitors’ failure to pay homage to the emperor and to assimilate into China:

The Westerner was often negated by being perceived as a devil, a ghost, an evil and unreal goblin hovering on the border of humanity. … Racial stereotypes, grafted upon the barbarian imagery that the Chinese had developed since the incipient stage of their civilization, contributed to the cultural defence of the menaced symbolic universe. … The repulsive physical features of the foreigner were interpreted as the outward manifestation of an innate inadequacy.

(1990: 422)


Invocations of ‘race’ as a unifying or dividing category have recurred in Chinese political and social life since these early encounters with ‘barbarians’ (Befu 1993; Dikotter 2010; Gries 2005, 2006; Sautman 1997; Suzuki 2007). National mythmaking holds that the Yellow Emperor, born five millennia ago in (or of) the Yellow River valley, is the progenitor of all modern Chinese people; the ‘yellow race’ (Allan 1991; Chow 1997; Dikotter 2008, 2010). In five element theory, Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor, is associated with the earth, the colour yellow, dragons, and the centre (zhong) (Allan 1991: 65); the last of these is significant because China calls itself Zhong Guo, the middle kingdom or centre country. Since the Qing dynasty, Darwinian science has been invoked and indigenized in China, with ‘race’ constructed as extending from Yellow-Emperor patrilineage and legitimized by taxonomies of human bodies and the ‘fact’ of unique, homogenous ‘Chinese’ phenotypical characteristics. This has included the more recent use of homo sapiens fossil finds in China as evidence for a racial ‘Chineseness’ and the use of anthropometrics to assess the bodily dimensions of minorities, including Tibetans, to ‘prove’ their Chineseness (Dikotter 2008). The ideas of place, race, and nation have thus been intimately interconnected and since the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and particularly since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 these ideas have been put to work in the name of national unity and state legitimacy.

Chinese nationalism and ‘patriotic education’

China’s oft-cited ‘five thousand years of history’ serves as the foundation for what Fairbank (1983: 99) describes as China’s ‘two great political myths: the unity of the Chinese empire and its superiority to all outsiders’. Regarding this first myth, Hillman and Henfry (2006: 253) describe the dominant, majority Han Chinese as practising Orientalism within China in their (con)quest to dominate through reductionism China’s non-Han people. The anti-Chinese protests in Tibet and Xinjiang in 2008–2009 and the self-immolations of Tibetans in Sichuan and elsewhere in 2011–2012 highlighted the resultant tensions within China’s (contested) borders. Fairbank’s second myth, of China’s imagined superiority, is discussed by Gries (2005: 42), who gives examples from the popular TV series A Beijinger in New York, and a Mo Yan novel (1996/2004). In the first, a character’s assessment of Americans is cited as: ‘[t]hey were still monkeys up the trees when we were already human beings. Look at how hairy they are, they’re not as evolved as us’. Similarly, in Yan’s novel, a Western priest is addressed as ‘you’re a bastard from a screwing between a man and a chimp’. China itself can therefore be seen as imperialistic, both through its actions in Tibet and Xinjiang but also in the way it belittles cultural ‘Others’.

Gries (2005, 2006) writes that a purpose of this kind of stereotyping and negative Othering of Western foreigners is the (re)construction of Chinese national identity and pride, and that this serves both to legitimize the unelected Communist government and to create a coherent sense of Chineseness. Suzuki (2007) describes a similar process whereby China negatively ‘Others’ Japan for same purpose.


But China’s imperialism is complicated by its own semi-colonial history (Barmé 1995), and its contemporary discourse on foreign Others must be positioned within a context in which China, humiliated in the past by foreign powers, seeks redress for the decades of abuse it endured. This included the 1842–1949 presence in Shanghai of foreign enclaves, or ‘concessions’, in which Chinese were treated as second-class citizens (Bickers 1999; Dong 2001). The foreign concessions are contextualized by China’s ‘century of humiliation’, which Gries (2005: 43–53) traces from 1842, when China lost the first Opium war to Britain, through many unequal treaties in which China was divided up into areas of foreign dominion, up to the loss of the first Sino-Japanese war of 1894–1895 in which China was forced to cede Taiwan and its territories in Korea. Following the collapse in 1911 of the Qing dynasty, China was divided into warlord-controlled sub-states until the 1937 occupation of Japanese forces culminating in the Nanjing massacre the same year; during Japan’s occupation of China until 1945 tens of millions of Chinese were killed, primarily civilians. Thus, by the time the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, China had undergone just over a century of subordination and destruction at the hands of foreign powers.

This recent history of humiliation looms large in the Chinese social imaginary and informs the interpretive paradigm for contemporary Western gestures and Chinese successes (Cai 2003). By ‘social imaginary’, I mean:

That set of symbols and conceptual frameworks particular to a social collectivity or network, which have been built up, modified, mediated and transformed over time, and which are drawn on in the sense-making process … The imaginary refers to the ways in which a nation or other grouping sees both itself, and others, that is, those considered not part of itself. … The media here is understood as a mediator and shaper of that set of projected and shared envisionings.

(Lewis 2009: 227)

Foreign gestures perceived as anti-Chinese are widely reported by the state-controlled media to bolster ‘patriotism’ within a rhetoric of victimization (Callahan 2004, 2009; Chang and Joseph 2001; Gries 2005: 48; Hughes 2005; Renwick and Cao 1999). The 2008 protests at the Olympic torch processions in Western cities, particularly Paris, are a telling example of perceived Western ‘China-bashing’, and the scuffles that ensued were widely interpreted as examples of the West insulting China. This resulted in protests outside French-owned Carrefour supermarkets in China and strong nationalist feelings on Chinese websites. While a suspicion of China certainly exists in the Western imagination, the Olympic torch protests were primarily about the Chinese government’s human rights abuses and media blackout of the Tibetan protests in early 2008. This is an example of how foreign events and gestures, although they may be anti-Chinese government, are portrayed as anti-Chinese and as foreign meddling in China’s affairs, within a paradigm of assumed anti-China feeling.


In contrast, past disasters in which the party-state is implicated are airbrushed (e.g. the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s and early 1960s, which claimed 36 million lives from policy-induced famine; in official accounts, Communist Party culpability is masked with the euphemism ‘the three years of natural disaster’; Yang 2010). Indeed, Yang Jisheng’s (2008) book on the Great Leap Forward, from which the (above, contested) death toll is taken, was banned in mainland China. But book-banning is just one tool in the creation of a ‘harmonious’ account of Chineseness. ‘Patriotic education’ also pervades textbooks across all levels of education and also reaches into museums, broadcast and print media (Callahan 2009), and the filtered internet (sometimes jokingly and subversively called the ‘innernet’).

Chinese triumphs are another important element of ‘patriotic education’. The efficient response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the successful staging of the 2008 Beijing Olympics are good examples, and were greeted with sometimes zero-sum patriotism within China. By ‘zero sum’, I mean a situation where a participant’s gain or loss is balanced by the losses or gains, respectively, of the other participant(s); if one wins, the other loses. This idea comes from game theory and applied to nationalism it means that the perceived victories of one nation are necessarily won at the expense of another. Chinese success, particularly over foreign Others, is a theme in popular culture, which explains the storyline of the 1990s television series mentioned above:

A Beijinger in New York depicted the trials and tribulations of Chinese businessman Wang Qiming … as he makes his way in the dog-eat-dog world of New York City. The series was perhaps most astonishing for its repeated racist depictions of America … [and] its attempts to construct a positive Chinese national identity at America’s expense. America is depicted as a land of mean-spirited conflict and self-interest; China, in contrast, is seen as a land of harmony and warm-hearted beneficence. David McCarthy, Wang’s chief American rival in business and love, epitomizes American avarice and ruthlessness. By the end of the Wang-McCarthy Sino-American contest, however, Wang has succeeded in business and love. McCarthy affirms Wang’s victory and Chinese superiority by heading off to China to teach English.

(Gries 2004: 42)

Brady’s (2003) book Making the Foreign Serve China provides a framework within which McCarthy’s symbolic humiliation may be understood: foreigners working in China work for China, and they legitimize both the party-state and China’s place in the world. Mao Zedong phrased this as ‘Make the past serve the present, and make foreign things serve China’ (Callahan 2009: 31).

Invoking the past, as Mao suggested, means the creation of a selective official history whose goal is:

[T]o present a singular correct view of ‘the real China’ … [t]he party-state works hard to assert an essentialized primordial view of Chinese civilization,


identity, and territory. … by promoting [what Jiang Zenmin called] ‘correct theories and unified thinking’. … Any arguments that offer a more complex view of Chinese history [and] identity … are dismissed as ‘unobjective’ examples of ‘Western bias’. … This unified understanding of China leads to a proliferation of pronouncements in the official media about what ‘the Chinese people think’ and what ‘the Chinese people feel’.

(Callahan 2009: 33–34)

In this official history, Chinese glories are highlighted, party-state disasters are elided, and humiliations are often attributed to aggressive outsiders; the purpose is to ‘arouse the righteous indignation of the Chinese people’ (Callahan 2009: 41), thereby wrapping party-state legitimacy in the flag. This results in a construction of ‘foreigners’ as ‘a wholly negative force: invaders, capitalists, imperialists, barbarians, and devils … [who] are characteristically described as greedy, crazy, reckless, shameless, unreasonable, and inhumane’ (ibid.: 41).

While foreign gestures that are less than fully supportive of the party-state are routinely condemned as (at best) foreigners’ inability to understand China ‘properly’ or (at worst) ad hominem attacks and accusations of ‘China bashing’, and while Callahan’s argument is otherwise persuasive, the ‘wholly negative’ construction of foreigners as ‘devils’ and ‘barbarians’ does not adequately represent real-life foreigners’ experiences ‘on the ground’ in China. Far from being vilified, (White, Western) foreigners mostly report respect and kindness in everyday encounters with ordinary Chinese people (e.g. DeWoskin 2005; Hessler 2001, 2010; Ilnyckyj 2010: 54). This may be because foreigners in China are constructed as ‘foreign friends’ and as ‘helping China’ by working for China (Brady 2003).

Chinese nationalism is, then, constructed in opposition to foreign Others, with China positioned as a victim and/or as a victor, and the two narratives co-exist (H. Li 2008). So, while China accommodates ‘foreign experts’ working in/for China as part of its drive for development, it does not welcome what was once termed ‘spiritual pollution’. China seeks to extract expertise, not values, from foreigners. Individual foreigners are welcomed, but they are also Othered: forever seen as essentially different from the Chinese Self. And when Western interference and/or criticism is perceived (and/or constructed by the state-party to bolster nationalism and, so, legitimacy) anti-foreign sentiments may emerge. These may be taken out on ostensibly representative symbols, such as French supermarkets. This is the context in which foreign teachers work and live.

Transnationalism and sensemaking

As well as living in China, the teachers in this study are transnational people trying to make sense of their lives and identities in a complex environment. Aihwa Ong (1999) defines as ‘transnational’ the ‘flexible citizenship’ of people whose professional and personal lives transcend nation-state boundaries and play out in hybrid spaces that are not, conventionally, their ‘own’. There is a growing body


of scholarship on the effects of transnationalism on individuals’ lives and identities as they migrate, often temporarily and often for work, across national boundaries (e.g. Angeles and Sunanta 2007; Hornberger 2007; Itzigsohn and Giorguli-Saucedo 2006; Leitner and Ehrkamp 2006; Lindgren and Wahlin 2001; Roudometof 2005).

But not all transnationals are created equal. There is a world of difference between, on the one hand, ‘transnational’ domestic maids from the Philippines working in the Gulf emirates, for example, and on the other hand ‘transnational’ managers on overseas postings within multinational corporations. Although both these groups are ‘temporary transnationals’, the identities, goals, and experiences of people at these extremes are very different (Stanley 2012a). Clarke (2005), Duncan (2004), and Uriely and Reichel (2000) counter the tendency of the transnationalism literature to focus on the extremes by describing working holidaymakers. Sojourning English teachers are conceptually comparable ‘middle-ground’ transnationals: many are experience seeking, perhaps in pursuit of self-actualization rather than motivated primarily by earning money. Both groups may be interested in acquiring symbolic, social, and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986) such as overseas experience, intercultural competence, ‘worldliness’, and language learning. There is also a substantial body of research on international students in English-speaking countries’ universities, who might be comparably conceptualized as middle transnationals. Such students may be motivated by the acquisition of overseas experience and intercultural and language capital, although they also acquire the more concrete educational capital of university degrees (e.g. Q. Gu and Maley 2008; Lin 2006; Ning 2002; Zhou et al. 2008). So although the transnationalism of sojourning English teachers has not been studied, other groups provide conceptually adjacent models with which to understand border-crossing experiences.

Bourdieu’s notion of capital (1986), mentioned above, theorizes the exchange values of different variables. This can be conceptualized as mapping multi-dimensional social space, in which individuals’ statuses and opportunities are quantifiable along different dimensions. The various forms of capital are valued differently in different arenas, and differentiation of capital reproduces social inequalities. Applying this to the present study, it is clear that the temporary ‘middle’ transnationalism of working holidaymakers, international students, or English teachers in China is both enabled by individuals’ pre-existing capital and it in turn confers capital on individuals. Transnational experience, then, transforms capital. In order to engage in transnational experiences, individuals need sufficient economic capital (money) and cultural capital (e.g. a university degree) to be able to leave home and find opportunities elsewhere. And, depending on how the individual engages with the experience, a transnational sojourn may confer expected ‘higher order’ skills (of intercultural competence and so on, as discussed in Chapter 2). But here is the rub: it may not.

What happens when people cross borders and live outside their ‘own’ social milieu? Zhou et al. (2008) discuss social identification theories as these are relevant to ‘culture shock’. They write:


During cross-cultural contact, people perceive themselves in a much broader context … This can lead to anxiety-provoking change in perceptions of self and identity. … Perceptions of and relations with in-groups and out-group can change radically.

(ibid.: 67)

Berry (1994, 1997) provides a conceptual model of what happens as a result. Individuals’ perceptions of their own identities shift during culture crossings, resulting in four possible positions: integration, separation, assimilation, and marginalization. Integrated individuals perceive themselves to be at ease in both their home and host societies whilst marginalized individuals perceive that their identities are challenged by both their home and their host societies, that is, that their own sense of self is not accorded the status they perceive it ‘deserves’ in either society. Between these extremes, separation refers to individuals who perceive their identities to be challenged in the host society but whose ‘home’ identities are congruent with their own appropriated identities. Assimilation is the opposite, and refers to individuals who perceive that they are accorded the identity they feel they merit in the host society but not in their home society. The effects of transnational experiences, then, depend on the individual.

But it is also important to note that the effects depend not just on the person and the host culture but also the ‘match’ between individual and culture. For example, an individual from culture A who feels him or herself to be ‘integrated’ into culture B may still feel ‘separated’ from culture C. Berry’s framework, then, does not describe either individuals or host cultures alone. Nor does it describe an all-purpose ‘intercultural competence’ that can be applied to any new culture. Rather, it describes an individual’s identity negotiation process when crossing into a specific, ‘other’ culture.

As for how this negotiation process takes place, Weick, Sutcliffe and Obstfeld (2005: 409) investigate individuals’ ways of dealing with novel situations, where ‘the current state of the world is perceived to be different from the expected state of the world’. This they call ‘sensemaking’, defined as ‘turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words’ (ibid.):

[S]ensemaking is an individual and ongoing process that relies on past experiences that have shaped our identity, which we use as cues to give plausibility to current events. Sensemaking is also influenced by our contact with others and the context in which the sensemaking takes place. … [S]ensemaking is grounded in identity construction because the outcomes of our sense of a situation have significance for who we are and how others see us.

(J. H. Mills, Weatherbee, and Colwell 2006: 495)

Sensemaking comprises: ordering chaos, noticing and classifying, making comparisons, and generalizing from cases. The sensemaking process is social rather than individual, and comprises both words and actions. This means that


people who put themselves outside of the settings that have shaped them engage in sensemaking both as individuals and as peer groups, and that this process in turn contributes to who they are or become. (A. J. Mills and J. H. Mills 2006; J. H. Mills, Weatherbee, and Colwell 2006; J. H. Mills and Wetherbee 2006; Weick et al. 2005).

But sensemaking is confined by the paradigms within which individuals operate, and these may not allow for meanings to be interpreted as they are intended. Blumer (1986) proposed three premises of symbolic interactionism. Firstly, people act towards things on the basis of the meanings that those things have for them. Secondly, things’ meanings are derived from social interaction. Third, those meanings are negotiated and modified through individuals’ interpretive processes as they deal with the things they encounter. The symbolic interaction framework, then, investigates the creation and interpretation of meaning through social interaction. This includes performed roles and consequent constructions of our own and others’ identities. Central to symbolic interactionism is the idea that people respond to others’ outward performances (i.e. behaviours and other signs) according to what those signs mean to them, and not necessarily actors’ intended meanings. Herein lies one source of well-intentioned intercultural miscommunication (Bhabha 1994, 1996; Brick 2004; Chan 2007; G. M. Chen and Starosta 2008; de Fina 2006; Hall 1997a, 1997b, 1997c; Hathaway 2007; Kelly 2008; Nixon 1997; Piller and Takahashi 2006; Signorini et al. 2009; Sparrow 2008).

Identity and authenticity

Sensemaking also affects identity constructions and overlaps with narration, in that we construct ‘fictions’, or our own ‘versions’, of lived experiences through which both to understand them but also through which to represent ourselves and our experiences to others. This is ‘narrative identity’ (Wodak et al. 2009), and is described as follows:

One proposes one’s identity in the form of a narrative in which one can re-arrange, re-interpret the events of one’s life in order to take care both of permanence and change, in order to satisfy the wish to make events concordant in spite of the inevitable discordances likely to shake the basis of identity. Narrative identity, being at the same time fictitious and real, leaves room for variations on the past – a ‘plot’ can always be revised … it is an open-ended identity which gives meaning to one’s practice.

(D. C. Martin 1995: 8)

Lindgren and Wahlin (2001) also describe this process, which they call ‘reflexive identity construction’. They write that identities are not fixed but are ‘continually socially constructed and subject to contradictions, revisions, and change’ (359) as we encounter novel stimuli.

So as we engage in transnational experiences we make sense of those experiences, and of our own identities vis-à-vis both the host and our home


cultures, through a self-reflexive, discursive process. This draws upon the ways we negotiate identities more generally. In the literature on identity construction there is a continuum of positions between the extremes of existentialism and societal constraint. At one end, the existentialist position holds that people are repositories of individual agency and have an essence that transcends socialization and contexts. At the other end, various positions explain people’s inherent situated-ness and determination by systemic constraint, in, for example, a Marxist class system (Joseph 2004: 74–75).

Between these positions, Varghese, Morgan, Johnston, and Johnson (2005) synthesize the literature on language teacher identity identifying three central ideas. Firstly, ‘identity is not a fixed, stable, unitary, and internally coherent phenomenon but is multiple, shifting, and in conflict (22). Secondly, ‘identity is not context-free but is crucially related to social, cultural, and political context’ (23). Finally, ‘identity is constructed, maintained, and negotiated to a significant extent through language and discourse’ (23). This positions identity as the interplay of contextual and individual factors, with myriad identities negotiated and constructed through discourse and social relations.

Within this middle ground, Bourdieu (1990) posits that people act in the ways they do because of their ‘dispositions’. By this, he means that individuals are socially-inculcated into ways of being, and that our actions and reactions, which are regular and rule governed, are attributable to our individual habitus. This is ‘embodied in the individual and in part underpins their action, but its source is a set of collective understandings drawn from beyond the individual’ (Callaghan 2005: para. 3.2). In Bourdieu’s framework, individuals have their own internal habitus that cannot be consciously accessed. This is ‘an open system of dispositions that is constantly subjected to experiences, and therefore constantly affected by them in a way that either reinforces or modifies its structures’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 133). So although people are constructions of their socio-contextual milieus, this process creates coherent individual selves that are carried from one social context to another.

However, there are tensions in this process of adapting to and being affected by novel situations, and Bourdieu (1990: 61) describes individuals’ habitus as tending to:

[P]rotect itself from crises and critical challenges by providing itself with a milieu to which it is as pre-adapted as possible; that is, a relatively constant universe of situations tending to reinforce its dispositions.

In other words, people seek to confirm and not disrupt their prior paradigmic understandings of how things are and should be. So to understand the participants’ experiences in China, and the sensemaking they engage in, we need to understand the paradigms that they bring to the context as well as the paradigms that people in the context bring to them.

Given the discussion earlier in this chapter about Chinese constructions of ‘foreigners’, one of the key sites of identity negotiation in this study is the way the


participants respond to expectations about them and also to evaluations of the ‘authenticity’ of their performances (as ‘authentic’ Westernness is imagined in China). Performance expectations borne of stereotyping operate like roles to provide frameworks within which individuals’ behaviours may or may not ‘fit’. So an individual’s performance (as a ‘foreign teacher’, for example) may be critically evaluated as ‘typical’ or ‘atypical’, or (insufficiently) ‘authentic’, according to out-group constructions about the cultural identification ascribed to the individual. This puts pressure on the participant teachers, as individuals are evaluated on the extent to which their performance corresponds to norms of their role as this is constructed by the dominant discourse in the context: in this case, the students’ discourses about ‘foreigners’ (Boyd 2006; Lumby 2009; Park and Wee 2008; Robinson and Phipps 2005).

Judith Butler’s work (1990, 1993, 1997, 2004, 2005) refers primarily to gender roles, and she critiques the existence of an ontological core to roles, which are instead socially constructed through ‘regulative discourses’. Individuals ‘perform’ these roles and in so doing form their own identities in relation to social roles. But the role itself is beyond the control of the individual performer, whose performance may correspond to a greater or lesser extent with the parameters of the role. Where individuals’ performances do not match expected roles, Butler writes (of gender roles):

[P]recisely because certain kinds of ‘gender identities’ fail to conform to those norms of cultural intelligibility, they appear only as developmental failures or logical impossibilities from within that domain.

(Butler 1990: 24)

This model can be applied to other roles. For example, if an individual teacher’s performance does not appear to correspond to socially inculcated notions of expected teacher roles, we might judge that individual teacher as deficient rather than question the role itself.

Some research in this area has been conducted in tourism studies, into tourists’ search for ‘authenticity’. MacCannell (2008: 334) distinguishes two discourses of culture in tourism:

The first would be an essentialist, realist ethnographic perspective that believes in authentic primitives and natives frozen in their traditions. And the second is a post-modern, post-structural, non-essentializing, hip version of culture as emergent, as constantly responding to challenge, changing and adapting.

Accounts abound about tourists’ experiences that are marred by the first discourse, because the performances of local people encountered by tourists are considered insufficiently ‘authentic’ when evaluated against tourists’ own constructions of local peoples’ cultures (Ateljevic and Doorne 2005; Badone and Roseman 2004; Kontogeorgopoulos 2003; Little 2004; Oakes 2006; Robinson and Phipps 2005; Rojek and Urry 1997; White 2007).


As a result, tourism providers may ‘stage authenticity’; Bruner (2005) describes Masai dance performances for tourists in Kenya, for example. Crang (1997: 148) describes such work, of playing expected roles, as ‘the deep acting of emotional labour’. He analyses different types of tourism performances, including ever-smiling airline staff and compulsorily bubbly, chatty, and flirty bar staff in Mediterranean resorts, and concludes that ‘these employees’ selves become part of the product … their personhood is commodified’ (ibid.: 153). However, it is more than just employees’ performances that are commodified by these jobs. Their ascribed characteristics – ethnicity, gender, age, and looks, for example – are ‘part of what is required from an employee’ (ibid.: 152).

This is relevant to the present study because of the ‘mutual gaze’ (Maoz 2006) between tourists and their hosts; the term ‘gaze’ originates in the ‘colonial gaze’ (Urry 1990). The gaze is mutual because while tourists gaze on their hosts so local people gaze back at their visitors. My finding, discussed in Chapter 7, is that it is the foreign teachers whose identities are commodified by their students’ Occidentalist constructions of ‘typical’ behaviours of the Western Other. Although the students are the ‘host’ culture, their ‘gaze’ and their expectations about foreign teachers have an effect on the performance of the latter. As Cargill (2006) suggests, this threatens teachers’ own appropriated self-identity.

Identities are formed, then, at the intersection of socially constructed notions of role and individuals’ repeated performances, and the extent to which these differ or correspond (Butler 1993). Kiesling (2006: 265) writes that:

[M]eaning and identities are created in actual daily performances against a backdrop of norms and expectations held by speakers about how actors in certain social categories do, or should, act and talk. Thus, speakers and hearers have knowledge about forms of language typically used by speakers of different identities in particular situations … [the resulting] [i]ndexes, and knowledge of them, become part of Discourses that are shared widely in a culture, and are therefore resources which can be used in interaction for identity performances.

This means that individual identities are appropriated and attributed, by ourselves and others respectively, in the context of the extent to which our individual performances correspond, or do not, to our culturally inculcated role expectations. Where there is discord between socially constructed roles and behaviours in those roles, identities are constructed by the sensemaking undertaken to explain the reasons for being different.

Westerners’ gendered identities in East Asia

If Westerners’ lives in China are complicated by political and historical contexts, they are also differentiated by gender roles and constructions. This section reviews literature from East Asia more widely so as to contextualize the situation in China.


This area has been researched most extensively in Japan, and while the two countries are very different it is useful to review this literature so as to shed light on the situation in China.

Piller and Takahashi (2006) describe demand-side imperialism in their research into Japanese women’s eroticization of Western men, who are constructed as chivalrous and romantic. One example of a Western man idealized in this way by the Japanese media is the British soccer player David Beckham, and Ito (2007: 169) describes how Beckham, and his ‘gendered national identity’, are constructed in Japan as sincere, kind-hearted, fun-loving, intimate, and the perfect husband. These attributed characteristics help explain why K. Bailey (2007: 590) found, in English language schools, that:

Japanese women of all ages were very open and confident in speaking with young, gaijin [foreign] men, ready to address subjects that they would not do with Japanese men or even gaijin women as their instructors.

McLelland (2003), in contrast, focuses on Japanese heterosexual masculinity, which is discursively constructed as deficient in Japanese women’s media and by Japanese women. This results in a situation satirized as Charisma Man in a serialized comic strip of the same name that appeared in a Japanese expatriate magazine (Kashper 2003). In this comic strip, Western men are ridiculed as sexually and socially successful in Japan only because they are gaijin:

The Japanese seem to see Westerners through some kind of filter. An obvious example was all the geeks I saw out there walking around with beautiful Japanese girls on their arms. These guys were probably social misfits in their home countries, but in Japan the geek factor didn’t seem to translate.

(Rodney, cited by Kashper 2003)

These texts contextualize William Kelly’s description of his own experience as an American English language teacher in Japan. Kelly writes:

Not unlike the adventurers and misfits who partially made up European colonial society, many of us [Westerners teaching English in Japan in the 1970s and early 1980s] did not experience comfort or success in our own country. Consequently it was pleasant to have status, money, and popularity merely on the basis of being White. … Some Japanese women accepted the image that Western men were more kind and less sexist as well as more romantic than Japanese men. Western men, including myself, often took Japanese women lightly and enjoyed the psychologically secure relationships that we had with them … their standards seemed lower. … The ability to enjoy such status and privilege was rooted in a colonial-type relationship between the United States and Japan.

(2008: 268)


This gendered power differential may result in Western men forming relationships in which Asian women have vastly unequal power (Angeles and Sunanta 2007; Halualani 2008) and perhaps choosing to remain in East Asia so as to enjoy privileges borne of identities attributed to Western masculinities. These attributed identities include the idea that Western men have ‘fair skin, blond hair, and gentle manners’ (Fouz-Hernández 2005: 137) and are ‘tall, humorous, good accent, well mannered, generous, nice eyes … Hugh Grant, a typical example’ (Philo 2007: 24 citing a research participant).

Little has been written on the effect of this on the men themselves, but two studies from South East Asia (Gilboa 1998; Howard 2008) indicate that these conditions may be damaging if they are not problematized. Citing interviewees, Gilboa (1998: 127–128) writes:

Cambodia is the kind of place where the years just slip by. I mean, they’ve spent the last thirty years stoned, teaching English three hours a day. You wake up one day and say, ‘Jesus Christ, I’m sixty-five. What the fuck am I still doing here? Get this young girl out of my bed, I gotta go home.’ … You see these old guys teaching English for seven dollars an hour. Every month they spend about three hundred for their room and food, and a couple of hundred for the teenage whores they’ve bought out of the brothel. That still leaves plenty of pocket money for ganja [marijuana]. … Where else is some fifty-year-old asshole going to live like that? Back in England?

While the use of drugs and sex workers is a lifestyle choice (albeit an arguably exploitative one), these practices may well be unacceptable in the men’s home societies, which they may consequently struggle to re-enter. While re-entry might not be their objective, social exclusion can nevertheless be psychologically damaging. Moreover, Western men whose attributed ethnicity and masculinity affords them status among some Asian women may form expectations of sexual relationships that are founded on power differentials rather than equality. Writing about Asian mail-order brides, Villapando (2000: 183) describes demand among Western men for women who are ‘passive, obedient, non-threatening and virginal; someone to devote her entire life to him, serving him and making no demands’. Expectations like these may also result in other Western men in East Asia being tainted by association.

Moving to Taiwan, Moskowitz examines Western men’s and local women’s constructed sexualities in Taipei’s dance clubs. There, he argues, Taiwanese women present to sometimes-naïve Western men their own sexual identities as chaste; Western men’s Orientalist notions support these fantasies. This is supported by the ‘prevalent perceptions that Westerners are more sexually decadent and free’ (Moskowitz 2008: 330). This is similar to Farrer’s (2002: 211) depiction of ‘international dating’ between Western men and Chinese women in Shanghai, which he describes as attractive to some Chinese women because of: the normalization of no-strings-attached sexual activity through special consideration of ‘foreign ways’, the association of ‘romance’ with


transnational Western men in Shanghai, Chinese women’s entry into transnationals’ subcultures, their hopes to travel and reside abroad through marriage, and the ‘use of the Other as a flattering mirror for one’s own sexual explorations’.

There appears to be a notion, then, in much of East Asia, that Western men are more sexually desirable than local men, whose masculinities may be constructed as deficient by the same discourse that reifies exonormative, Western masculinities. Farrer (2002: 322–324) describes the resultant idealization and commodification of foreign men by some Chinese women in Shanghai.

But Western women do not seem to be constructed as similarly sexually attractive, perhaps because they, too, are constructed, as Westerners, as sexually more available, open, fun loving, adventurous, and exotic. These same qualities that are valued as facets of Western men’s attributed masculinities seem to have the opposite effect when attributed to Western women, as this would result in their being constructed as less ‘feminine’ than local women. Farrer (2002: 323) paints an ugly stereotype of expatriate Western women in Shanghai as that of a ‘brash, expat woman jealously draped around her expat mate, her exposed cleavage glowering down at the local competition’. This is similar to Fechter’s (2007: 157–158) finding, in Indonesia, that expatriate women may feel jealous and suspicious of local women’s ‘predatory manner’ towards their husbands.

Conclusion

Westerners in China may be expected to behave in ways that are stereotypical of (gendered) Western foreigners, as these ideas are constructed by Occidentalism and nationalism discourses. These expectations put pressure on individuals to conform, to perform, and/or to negotiate why their performances are ‘deviant’ to expectations.

Such discourses seriously challenge Shanghai’s social imaginary of itself as mainland China’s foremost world city. The desire to attract expatriates may be borne of status seeking:

[T]he expatriate community keeps the city in the global game … To be recognized as truly global, Asian cities compete with each other to welcome foreign experts or émigrés who have been educated abroad.

(Ong 2007: 86)

However, the realities of Shanghai’s transnational spaces, like Dubai’s (Walsh 2007), may be more neo-colonial than multicultural (Ley 2004), with expatriates living separate lives from all but local elites. This stems from the construction of ‘foreigners’ as irreducibly different from the Chinese. These discourses also profoundly affect the role, performance expectations, and ultimately the constructed identities of foreigners living and working in (or, arguably, for) China.

4 Showing the workings

In his work on research methods, Holliday (2002) exhorts researchers to ‘show the workings’ in data construction, analysis, and presentation, and this chapter does exactly that. The discussion begins with an overview of my research methodology. I then explain the way I undertook this project including the way I handled reflexivity and ethics. I discuss my data sources and the inductive analysis methods of grounded theory, and provide information on the teacher participants in this study as well as the other people I interviewed. I also used stimulated recall and in this chapter I explain the way I wove classroom observation data and data from previous interviews into later interviews so as to deepen the data. This meant engaging also with other sources of data: students’ evaluations of their teachers, focus groups with students and others, and on-going communication with the key participants.

I started my research for this book in 2007 and submitted an earlier version of the present text as my PhD thesis in early 2010. My examiners strongly advised book publication and both graded my research as ‘exceptional’ against every marking criterion. I also won the university doctoral medal and the postgraduate research award of the International Education Association of Australia. And so I knew I had to turn my study into a book. But the ‘story’ of the teachers in the research context was incomplete and I wanted to find out what they had gone on to do, the impact of these experiences on their subsequent teaching and lives, and their perceptions of participating in the study. So I went back to re-interview most of the participants in 2011, and the findings from these interviews appear in Chapter 12.

Qualitative research and grounded theory

This is a qualitative study underpinned by a socially constructionist epistemology: I understand ‘truth’ not as something external and falsifiable, but rather as something constructed by and between people. My research emphasizes understanding the subjects’ (subjective) points of view and the complexities of socially situated phenomena. To quantitative researchers as well as some lay readers, this kind of thing may conflict with understandings of ‘proper’ research involving experimentation, objective ‘facts’, representative sampling, and so on.

Showing the workings 65

But this is an ethnographic study: it makes no claims about what is going on in China, or in English language teaching more generally, beyond what is happening in this context for these teachers. By its very nature, qualitative research is cautious in its claims, reticent in its recommendations, and local in its limits. So my aim is not to survey all teachers or to make claims about anywhere else, but to show what the experiences of these teachers are like, in this context. This kind of in-depth study sheds light on a very complex situation and allows for access to an array of issues, contradictions and conflicts in this intercultural, liminal, and contested space.

Qualitative research relies on ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973) and assumes an ‘emic’ perspective, that is, a consideration of phenomena within the meaning-system in which they appear. But how can we describe teachers’ lives ‘thickly’? I visited and revisited the research site (see Figure 4.1), each time interviewing and re-interviewing participants and showing them their own previous data and my theorizing on it, asking them to comment further. This allowed for ‘thicker’ description and something closer to participants’ intended meanings. This has also allowed me to document change over time, and to quote the participants’ own words wherever possible so as to remain truer to their own understandings. I also showed teachers their own classroom videos so as to access their thinking about their rationale rather than relying on observations alone. And I participated in the teachers’ discourse communities in order to provide ‘emic’ descriptions.

In order to do all of this, I used mixed data construction and analysis methods, primarily ethnography, grounded theory, and case study research. Within qualitative research, methodological eclecticism may be regarded as sidestepping side taking. However, eclecticism also affords the opportunity to use what works best for different purposes, and Patton (2002: 248) writes that ‘studies that use only one method are more vulnerable to errors linked with that particular method than studies that use multiple methods in which different types of data provide cross-data validity checks’.

Grounded theory is an inductive method in which emergent data informs the research direction. Thus, it was impossible, and undesirable, to go into the fieldwork with pre-conceived ideas of how the research would progress. Instead,

Visit 1 Visit 2 Visit 3 Visit 4

Aug–Nov 2007 June 2009 Jan 2011

12 weeksparticipantresearch, classroomobservations,interviews and focusgroups.

Three weeksclassroomobservations andfollow-upinterviews.

Two weeks’ follow-up interviews andfocus groups.

Three weeks’follow-upinterviews inShanghai,Qingdao,Beijing, andPhnom Penh(Cambodia).

May–June 2008

Figure 4.1 Details of my fieldwork


I allowed for a relatively long period in the field during which I could get a feel for what was going on and cycle through my data gathering and initial analysis phases in order to inform subsequent data construction. Sampling in grounded theory is theoretical, which means that cases are selected according to new insights that they permit. Interpretations of grounded theory range from the more positivist position of Strauss and Corbin (1998) to the more constructivist interpretation of Charmaz (2006). In line with the exploratory nature of this study, I have been inspired by Charmaz’s approach. This allows for a less formulaic, more flexible interpretation of the procedures of grounded theory.

What this means is that I drew understandings from my time spent with the participant teachers, and I have watched, participated, and learned as they engaged in their ‘ordinary activities’ (Brewer 2004: 315). However, although this study draws upon ethnographic traditions, it is not purely ethnographic; the time I spent among the participants was simply too short. So in addition to my participant data I conducted interviews, classroom observations, document analyses, and focus groups. The interviews and focus groups were semi-structured, so although I had interview schedules and an idea of areas emerging from the data that I wanted to explore, there was also scope to talk about areas of interest to the participants themselves.

Grounded theory allowed for the data to dictate the theoretical frameworks I used, and I wrote most of the theoretical and literature review sections of this study after I had recorded and analysed the initial data. Data analysis and theory development in grounded theory involves microanalysis at word and sentence level, with the use of open coding of categories towards the identification of patterns within and between these (Charmaz 2006). This meant that I did not go to Shanghai with pre-conceived constructs into which I hoped to fit the data. Instead, the data itself was the source of my findings and my argument. It is a requirement of grounded theory that a concept’s relevance to the evolving theory be proven through the data in order to guard against researcher bias. This is why I have used direct quotes from the data extensively throughout my later chapters (from Chapter 5 onwards), as my aim is to stay true to the data itself. This also explains the inclusion of a rather longer interview excerpt later in this chapter, to give a flavour of the type of conversations I had with the participants.

Research practicalities and participants

I began this project by asking questions:

How do short-course-trained teachers adapt to a new teaching context? What happens to their teaching as a result? Does tinkering with surface-level practice without a clear understanding of underlying rationale de-skill such teachers? If it does, how does this process occur? What can be learned from this that may inform short course ELT training? And/or how can institutions in different educational contexts better support their foreign teachers?


And what happens to teachers as people if their training does not ‘match’ the teaching context? How does feeling inadequately trained affect them, and their confidence? How does living abroad affect Western teachers’ identities more generally? Does it depend on their reasons for being there, and/or the extent to which they feel invested in the educational paradigm in which they learned and were trained? Might it depend on non-work factors? What are their lives there like?

These were some of the questions that motivated this study. To find answers, I realized I had to seek out a situation in which short-course-trained teachers were teaching in circumstances where the educational culture was quite different from one with which they were familiar. This is why I chose China.

Having planned my data gathering process, which is outlined later in this chapter, I then had to find and gain access to participant teachers and their work context. Business and other relationships in China are governed by the informal, phenomenally important, system of guanxi, which translates as ‘connections’. This describes the networking through which deals are done and favours are traded. To gain access to the university I had to draw upon my guanxi. And, luckily, my guanxi is good; I had worked in China and with many Chinese teachers, some of whom are university gatekeepers. So I drew upon my network and they put me in touch with Western teachers at various Chinese universities. However, most of the teachers I contacted had no ELT-specific training at all.

So I cast the net wider, and contacted a friend who worked for ABC English. ABC English, a pseudonym, is a Chinese language school chain along the lines of Nova and GEOS (until recently) in Japan. My friend put me in touch with ‘Phil’, also a pseudonym, who manages the ABC English ‘University Cooperation’ project. This is an arrangement in which Western English teachers are supplied to universities; ten universities in Shanghai alone recruit and manage their foreign English teachers this way. ABC English has substantial experience of handling work visas and other practical issues, and providing teacher professional development. And, unlike the universities who recruit directly, ABC English’s requirement for teachers is a degree plus an ELT certificate. So it was through ‘Phil’ that I gained access to ‘People’s Square University’ (PSU; also a pseudonym) in Shanghai.

I had not met any of the participants before I went to China in August 2007 to begin my fieldwork and, because of the difficulty and last minute nature of teacher recruitment in China (Watkins 2006), there was no guarantee before I arrived in China that the teachers at PSU would match my research plan. But they did; most were trained on short ELT courses. I had initially planned to restrict my research to CELTA/equivalent-trained teachers (see Chapter 5), but two teachers with other training types (Beth and Leo) and one with no training at all (Ryan) were keen to participate, so I included them. As will become clear, these participants provided some of the most valuable data.

My first data source was field notes. I was a participant teacher working among the teaching team at PSU, and I made detailed notes of what I saw, experienced, and felt there. These field notes in turn informed my interview foci with the participants and


informants. The second source of data was interviews and classroom observations, and I developed an interview-observation-interview procedure so as to access teachers’ stated beliefs and rationales about their practice using their observable classroom behaviours as stimulus for access to deeper data about teachers’ rationale.

I began with initial interviews, in which I interviewed each participant teacher and invited them to describe their own educational backgrounds, reflections on teaching in China, and their perceptions of the learning outcomes from their ELT training. These initial interviews lasted 80–120 minutes each and were semi-structured around a series of prompts and guiding questions. This allowed for participants to describe their own circumstances and issues as they saw fit. I then observed the teachers teaching and the lessons were videotaped. Since 2004, I had been a trainer on pre-service ‘short’ ELT courses including CELTA, and I used the CELTA assessment criteria to make notes on salient events in the observed lessons to ask about later. Then the teachers were interviewed again, as soon as possible after the lesson, with the follow-up interview consisting of the teacher and me watching the lesson together and discussing what had happened, and why, and how the teacher felt about classroom events as they had taken place. As an example of this process, the next section describes one of the participant’s lessons and provides an excerpt from the follow-up interview. The follow-up interviews were longer than the initial interviews, averaging 120–180 minutes. Teachers were then given the opportunity, without obligation, to repeat the observation/video-watching cycle with another class or lesson and/or to be interviewed again. Most participants were thus observed and interviewed many times over several visits. In addition, some participants provided additional data on e-mails, often in response to transcripts of their own previous interviews or to inform me about events at PSU in between my visits.

I also used data from informant interviews, focus groups, and documents. Informants were recruited by snowball sampling within my Shanghai network and those of the participants. This included the following people (information is given only on those that I quote in this study; I interviewed many others). The PSU students I interviewed (some alone, others in focus groups) included Chao, Guo, Huang, Lili, Ping, and Xiaoli; all were third year undergraduates. Then there were the non-participant foreign teachers working at other universities and in other English language teaching contexts in Shanghai; these included Greg, Neil, and Trish, from the UK, Canada and Australia respectively. I also interviewed several non-participant teachers at PSU, both Chinese and Western; these included Hua, my Chinese co-teacher, and also Alan, Jon, Sam, Todd, and Steph, from the UK and the USA. And I interviewed people I termed ‘Old China Hands’: managers, recruiters and teacher trainers of (mainly foreign) teachers in various Chinese ELT contexts; these included Val, Zoe, Yasper, Ursula, and Will, from Australia, the USA, Belgium, Canada and Ireland respectively.

I also collected PSU documents such as teacher induction materials, student assessment instruments, and teachers’ lesson plans and materials. And I maintained e-mail contact with Phil, the Academic Manager, and with some of the PSU teachers including Ryan, Karen, Dan, Beth, Jon, and Sam, and they periodically sent me further data they thought may be useful for my study. I also have data


about my own teaching, comprising lesson plans, classroom activities, and video recordings of my own lessons. Additionally, I obtained data from students’ written evaluations of their foreign teachers and from my own PSU students, who wrote feedback on the various activity types I used in class.

The participant teachers’ basic biographical information appears in Figure 4.2. This information is necessarily brief and essentialized, fitting my categories, as I want to provide an overview of the teachers. A more personalized introduction to the individuals appears in Chapter 5.

Pseudo-nym

Datafrom

Nationality, age, gender; professional role; qualifications;ELT experience

Ollie

Phil

2007,2008,2009,2011

British, 40, male; Oral English Teacher at PSU; (Senior Teacher in second semester of 2007–2008 academic year); BA in Fine Art; TEFL International Certificate; 18 months’ teaching experience in Thailand; One semester teaching oral English at PSU.

2007,2008,2009,2011

British, 34, male; Academic Manager of University Cooperation project, which includes the PSU oral English project; BA in Education with English; Trinity CertTESOL andTrinity Diploma in TESOL (finished in late 2008); Teaching English and managing ELT programs in Shanghai since 2000 including two years as Director of Studies of oral English at PSU; IELTS Examiner.

Beth 2007,2008,2009,2011

American, 29, female; Oral English Teacher at PSU;BA in Psychology; MA in Anthropology; undertaking PhD inFolklore; International Studies pre-departure program,including an ELT component.

Claire 2007,2008

British, 23, female; Oral English Teacher at PSU;BA in Sociology and Social Policy; Trinity CertTESOL;Six months English teaching at a Shanghai primary school;Six months as a teaching assistant at a UK high school.

Dan 2007,2009,2011

American, 38, male; Oral English Teacher at PSU; (SeniorTeacher in 2008–2009); BA in English and Theatre; TEFLInternational Certificate; Nine months’ teaching experiencein Thailand; One semester teaching oral English at PSU.

Karen 2007,2008,2009

British, 23, female; Oral English Teacher at PSU;BA in English Literature; Cambridge CELTA;Six months English teaching at a UK language school.

Leo 2007,2008,2009,2011

Chinese-Canadian, 29, male; Director of Studies of oralEnglish at PSU; BA in Marketing; Unaccredited correspondence ELT course; Two years at a language school in Shanghai; Two years oral English teaching experience at PSU.

Mike 2007 British, 26, male; Oral English Teacher at PSU;BSc in Artificial Intelliegence; English First Certificate in TEFL;Two years oral English teaching experience at PSU.

Ryan 2007,2008,2009,2011

Canadian, 27, male; Oral English Teacher at PSU; BA in International Relations; Three years teaching at a children’slanguage school (buxiban) in Taiwan.

Figure 4.2 Participant teachers’ biographical information (at August 2007)


Reflexivity, positionality, and ethics

Reflexivity is a research method used to allow researchers to acknowledge, manage, and transcend their own subjectivity and positionality so as to allow for emic reporting of participants’ own voices and meanings. It deals with the influence of the researcher on the text (Pillow 2003). This means that two different researchers viewing the same construct may record it in very different ways, a product not of construct differences but of the different ‘lenses’ through which they view the world, a product of their own habitus (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). But scratches of subjectivity do not render the reflexive researcher’s lens useless. Instead, knowing the location and nature of the inevitable scratches allow us to see beyond them.

The historian and travel writer James/Jan Morris provides a fascinating case study in subjectivity. Jan Morris lived and wrote as James Morris before undergoing gender reassignment surgery in 1972. Morris’s early writing, such as the 1953 account of the Everest conquest, reads as an ‘adventure story … [with] male pleasure [and] male heroes … there are even sketchy maps, code words and boxes of treasure’ (Phillips 2001: 10). This contrasts with Morris’s later work, in which she has emphasized ‘gentleness as against force, forgiveness rather than punishment, give more than take, helping more than leading’ (Morris 1974: 18). Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so the beholder constructs ‘truth’. Bogdan and Biklen (1998: 35) write:

[R]esearchers can never eliminate all of their own effects on subjects or obtain a perfect correspondence between what they wish to study – ‘the natural setting’ – and what they actually study – ‘a setting with a researcher present’.

How, then, are we to deal with this issue? Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) argue that we must be aware of possible distortions to our own objectivity through awareness and vigilance as to our own paradigm and its likely effects. By being explicit about our own position and interest in, and a priori beliefs and knowledge about a situation, we can mitigate some of the effects of reflexivity. This is why I discuss my own positionality in relation to the research.

To manage my own ‘self’ in the research I wrote extensive notes before leaving for China about what expected to find. This allowed me to engage with the question of whether I was seeing my own reflection in the data or looking at the participants and hearing their stories. I have worked since the mid 1990s with newly qualified teachers trained on ‘short’ ELT courses, first as a Director of Studies at an International House school in Poland, then as a national manager for a multinational language teaching company in China, and finally as a CELTA trainer in Australia. In addition, I am a ‘career’ English teacher, which not all sojourning teachers are: although I was initially motivated in ELT by spending time in Peru and improving my Spanish, I had since undertaken diploma and Masters qualifications in ELT. As discussed in Chapter 2, this makes me rather


atypical as a foreign teacher in China. I therefore wanted to guard against projecting my own assumptions onto the participants by interrogating my own thinking before I went into the field. Broadly, my notes covered three areas: life as a Westerner in China, life as a newly-trained teacher, and my defaults around ‘good’ language learning and teaching. As an example of this reflexivity writing, here is an excerpt from what I wrote about my own ‘China identity’:

I spent my 20s as a travelling English teacher and China made me question my own practice and my professional identity. I had found CLT to be received reasonably well everywhere I had worked [Peru, Poland, Qatar, and the UK] until I reached China [in 2003]. There, I encountered ‘ELT with Chinese characteristics’ and I struggled to know what it meant to be a ‘good’ teacher anymore. Much of what goes on in Chinese English classrooms clashed with my paradigm of ‘effective’ English teaching. I also have very mixed feelings about China itself. On the one hand, it is an incredible place; diverse, enormous, fast changing, and so many of its people are quick to laugh. On the other hand, I firmly resist the quick-profit-at-any-cost subculture of Shanghai corporate life [in which I had worked]. Luckily, though, this has not been not my only China experience. I’ve travelled all over China for work, research, and play since I lived there. There is nothing I love more than getting on a Chinese night train that turns into a pyjama party, with everyone sharing instant noodles and smiles. This is a much more welcoming China experience, I think, than being the honoured guest visiting a franchise school [which is what I used to do in China], being greeted with flower displays and a banquet. The latter feels formulaic: a nod to role and status rather than an engagement with a human being. I’ve struggled with this: I have never been so aware of my foreignness and relative status as I am in China, and everywhere else I’ve ever lived I’ve been able to integrate and become part of local life. In Shanghai I couldn’t do that and after a while I stopped trying. It’s perfectly possible, although not particularly satisfying, to live a wholly expat life. But that’s just not who I am or how I live. In Peru and Poland most of my friends were locals and many of them didn’t speak much English [my Spanish and Polish are fairly proficient]. In contrast, I’ve resisted learning Chinese: I can get by, do practical stuff, shoot the breeze, but I’m a long way from fluent. I don’t feel particularly drawn to China and so I don’t get any kind of buzz from learning Chinese. But for better or worse China is a huge part of my own identity. I like China very much as a place to visit, but I don’t belong there.

(Phiona 2007 ‘reflexivity notes’)

What did this tell me? I realized that I needed a very open mind about ‘good’ language teaching, and that I needed to consider how the students, teachers, and other stakeholders might understand teacher effectiveness. This is one source of the successful versus effective distinction that I make in Chapter 10. I also realized that issues of belonging, status, and motivation were very much at the forefront


of my own transnational identity negotiations, and that it was imperative to listen for perspectives other than these and also to hear different interpretations within these areas. I have done this: so many themes emerged in the data that I had not anticipated, and this study has also taken me much deeper into the very issues that I wrote about, in 2007, as being my ‘own’. As will become clear, the participants had their own experiences of belonging, status, and motivation that were quite different from mine but which resonated, in places, with my own. I revisit this in Chapter 12. Another thing that is notable here is what is missing: I had not really considered gender differences, I had not thought about ‘fun’, and the type of ‘teachers’ who are entirely uninterested in anything to do with teaching had always passed me by.

Additionally, I had not problematized why I was researching in China, specifically, and just how much of a ‘China study’ this would become. China was simply expedient. This book could have been ‘set’ almost anywhere: it is about short-course-trained teachers’ experiences in a culture of learning very different from their own, and China was a reasonable choice. But Algeria or Brazil or Cambodia would also have worked, and this study would likely have been very different. As a result, I have become an accidental, sometimes reluctant, China Hand. This also positioned me, particularly in the latter stages of the research when many of the participants were much more China-proficient than me.

Positionality also affects credibility, which measures the believability of the research (Brown and Rodgers 2002: 242). But this raises the question: believable for whom? In presenting my research I have encountered some scepticism from some academics and teachers. It would be possible to paint a vivid picture of minimally trained Western ‘teachers’ as neo-colonial exploiters of developing-world students, imposing their cultures and generally behaving like barbarians. Those with postcolonial axes to grind might applaud such ‘credibility’. But for some young, under-trained, under-supported teachers far from home, naively trying to make a difference and do the best they can, this would be inaccurate. Greenwood and Levin (2005: 54), writing about action research, argue that credibility should be measured by the extent to which the research is credible to those researched. In Chapter 12, therefore, I explore the effect that involvement with the study has had on the participants themselves, including their reactions to my rendering of their stories.

My positionality both helped and hindered me in telling the teachers’ stories and in ‘bonding’ with them. On the one hand, I felt I knew something about their likely realities as I, too, have been a foreign teacher overseas and had lived in Shanghai. The downside, beyond the need to manage my own influence on the text as discussed above, was that there was a danger of me coming across as having ‘been there, done that’ and so being seen as more ELT qualified and experienced and perhaps intimidating. Gaining acceptance was therefore a question of identifying and emphasizing commonalities with the teachers. Luck also played a part. I am a Scottish-Australian ‘Western’ woman and I was 34 when I first met the participants, who are also ‘Western’, and whose average age was 28. But I also consciously looked for common ground on which to bond. Phil and


Beth and I talked books; Ryan and Dan and I talked travels and language learning. Claire and I rescued a street kitten together; Karen and I had just come out of relationships and we talked a lot about those. Mike fixed my computer for me; Ollie and Leo and I went for lots of lunches. By luck and a bit of planning, therefore, I was able to ‘belong’ among the foreign teachers at PSU.

Positionality became particularly salient when I came to researching gender differences in the teachers’ experiences at PSU. Some of these conversations became very personal, centering on constructed masculinities in the ‘playboy mansion’ of PSU; this is discussed in Chapter 9. Some of the younger men (aged 23–26) talked about having sex with their students and lads’ nights out involving ‘nailing a lot of birds’ and ‘banging hookers’. I thought again about the effect of my own identity. It helped that I had met most of the teachers before and that I had built friendships with some of them over the years of the fieldwork. But my positionality helped here too. I am ten years older than these men; old enough (and if I am honest, not ‘hot’ enough!) to not be of sexual interest to them. But I am still young enough not to make them think they are talking to their mothers. My Western culture and White ethnicity also played a part, as some of the discourses I encountered were strongly Orientalist. I doubt I would have heard so much about ‘submissive’ Asian women if I had been an Asian woman researcher. Additionally, the men I interviewed did not seem to feel it necessary to ‘prove’ their masculinity where perhaps with a male researcher they would have been less candid about their vulnerabilities.

There is an ethical dilemma here, in my response to the disclosures I heard. These were difficult conversations to have. I spent a lot of time nodding in encouragement while trying not to (appear to) pass judgment. Personally, I feel that the attitudes of some of these men are quite distasteful and, perhaps, in concealing this opinion I have seduced and betrayed my interviewees. But I also understand that these attitudes are largely encouraged and certainly enabled by the situation and that some of these men are rather vulnerable young people far from home and negotiating quite substantial peer pressure. They shared their stories and opinions with me and I have an obligation to tell their stories within their own, situated perspectives, and to try to understand their realities. As with all the data, these stories are contextually situated. My concern is that these experiences may be damaging for the men themselves.

What about a duty of care for their students? This is complex, and Chapter 9 explores this issue in more detail. While I do not think the teachers should be having sexual relationships with their students, I understand it is often the Chinese women who instigate these liaisons and that some of the men feel quite overwhelmed by the attention they receive. Also, most of the teachers and students are roughly the same age (early 20s). So this is not the same as the abuse of a position of power that would result from, for example, a teaching job in a high school (where the students are minors), a situation in which much older men prey on much younger women (as happens in other contexts I know of in China), or a teaching job where teachers have any real power (in which students might feel pressured by their teachers’ discretion to give or withhold good grades,


for example). So while I think that PSU should more carefully police the teachers’ behaviour, I am aware that it is a situation that would exist with or without my involvement.

In other ways this study is ethically straightforward: participants were fully informed about the nature of the research, were under no obligation to participate and, as all are university-educated, were able to give ‘informed consent’. Further, I took normal precautions to preserve anonymity and data integrity: data is recorded and secured, pseudonyms are used, and identifying details have been made vague.

But a further ethical dilemma is present. By researching among a close-knit group I have heard a lot from the participants but also about them. They all talked about each other. This means that, inevitably, the participants who are interested in reading my work will one day be able to recognize themselves and each other, and hear what was said about them. While some of the things I heard came with a ‘don’t tell him I said that’-type warning, which I have respected, I have included many quotes in which participants mention their colleagues. Many of these are complimentary or neutral; many simply confirm stories the participants themselves have told me, sometimes giving a different angle or a personal interpretation. This often reveals more about the storyteller than the story. But some rather negative comments were also made. I handled this problem with the notion of informed consent. Participants knew our conversations were being recorded and they had a chance to see what they had said on transcripts and in follow-up interviews, in which I often used participants’ own quotes as a stimulus for more discussion.

Additionally, all the participants except Ollie have now moved on to other lives and careers. They no longer work together every day, which would have been ethically problematic if they read each other’s comments and this caused a rift. With this in mind, I sent a draft version of this study to Phil, Dan, and Beth; in Chapter 12 they reflect on the experience of reading it. While I have used pseudonyms throughout, the reality is that any of the teachers will be easily able to identify their colleagues in the text. This is unavoidable, as to make people unrecognizable to each other would have meant blurring the very details that make their stories what they are. Arguably, it was ethically questionable to have sent them the text. But I felt it was more problematic not to show them, as this is their story and they are the very people who helped me create it.

Stimulated recall: Ollie’s relative clauses lesson

This section describes a segment from an observed lesson and part of the transcript from the subsequent video-viewing interview. It is included for three reasons. First, it illustrates the ‘think aloud’ protocol used to elicit teachers’ thinking about their teaching. Second, it clarifies my role as a participant researcher who is also a teacher educator; as I discuss in Chapter 12, I wanted to have a beneficial effect on the context and participants if at all possible. Third, it highlights the issue, discussed in Chapter 5, of most participants’ weak grammatical awareness and some of the effects of this on their teaching.


Ollie wrote pairs of sentences on the board: I like laptops. They are small and easy to carry.I like dogs. They are friendly and loyal.I like girls. They are beautiful and intelligent.I like boys. They are handsome and strong.

He then explained the task, of joining pairs of sentences using ‘question words’ and elicited the following from the examples on the board:

I like laptops that are small and easy to carry.I like dogs that are friendly and loyal.I like girls who are beautiful and intelligent.I like boys who are handsome and strong.

Ollie then gave the following substitution table, for students to produce their own examples of sentences with relative clauses. He asked them each to give a relative clause sentence in response to his calling their names from the class register.

Objects: I like ___ that are ___.Animals: I like ___ that are ___.People: I like ___ who are ___.

(Phiona ‘synthesized field notes on Ollie’s observed lesson’ 27/09/2007)

This resulted in the following exchange [the students’ names are their chosen pseudonyms]:

OLLIE: OK, Maggie, where’s Maggie?MAGGIE: I like software, they are helpful.OLLIE: Good, OK. So, I like software that, that?MAGGIE: That are helpful.OLLIE: That is. OK, Kane, where’s Kane. One sentence.KANE: I like PSP [PlayStation Portable]. [pause] That is small and easy to carry.OLLIE: OK, you like PSP as it’s small and easy to carry. [pause]OLLIE: OK, Jimmy?JIMMY: I like football that is exciting and interesting.OLLIE: You like playing football? OK, good. [pause]OLLIE: OK, where’s Ika, Ika is it?IKA: I like pigs that are lazy and lovely.OLLIE: OK, good. … Where’s Echo?ECHO: I like cats. They are clever and lovely.OLLIE: Can we have another animal? Because [a previous student] used cats.IKA: Birds.ECHO: I like birds they are small and lovely.OLLIE: Good, good.

(Ollie ‘observed lesson video’ 27/09/2009)


In terms of grammar, there are issues of both meaning and form here. Firstly, the students seem to be unclear on the meaning of defining relative clauses, perhaps thinking (as Ollie seems to) that the relative clause is used to explain/justify the main clause (e.g. I like PSP Why? Because it is small and easy to carry). This is different from defining relative clauses, which define a subset of a larger whole (e.g. ‘I like cats that are friendly.’ i.e. I don’t like those that are unfriendly). Kane illustrates this misunderstanding, as he seems to be under the impression that relative clauses can be used to provide more information about a single item (e.g. PSP) and can be used to explain why he likes it. These flawed understandings of meaning can be illustrated as:

KANE: I like PSP. Why? It is small and easy to carry.IKA: I like pigs. Why? They are lazy and lovely.ECHO: I like birds. Why? They are small and lovely.

There are also issues of form, including the exclusion of singular/plural verb forms from Ollie’s substitution table (hence Maggie’s error with her uncountable example) and the issue that several of the students do not in fact use the relative clause but are praised for their efforts anyway. Perhaps reassuringly, Ollie at times corrects students away from the target form:

KANE: I like PSP. [pause] That is small and easy to carry.OLLIE: OK, you like PSP as it’s small and easy to carry.

It is reassuring that Ollie does not try to force Kane’s PSP example into a relative clause, because this single product does not form a set of items within which there might be a definition as to which of the set Kane likes. However it is worrying that Ollie does not realize that he is correcting Kane away from the target structure.

I interviewed Ollie the day after the lesson and asked him about these issues. An excerpt from the post-lesson interview follows:

PHIONA: So what you’re wanting to do here is the relative clauses. So why that, why relative clauses?

OLLIE: [laughs] Because it’s in the book. …PHIONA: And what problems do you think that they have with relative clauses,

what are the issues? [pause] What’s difficult about relative clauses?OLLIE: They’re, they can be quite complicated sentences.PHIONA: In what way?OLLIE: Just joining two clauses together with a question word, or, it’s

complicated.PHIONA: OK, so why’s it complicated?OLLIE: Well, my knowledge of that aspect of grammar is not [pause] huge.

So if you ask me to analyse that aspect of it I couldn’t really give you much detail because it’s something I’ve just learned.


PHIONA: So when you say you’ve just learned it, what did you learn?OLLIE: Well, just that you join two sentences using a question word, like

why or who.PHIONA: … Do you think they could do it?OLLIE: Yeah, there was a couple of problems with the objects and the

animals but I’d purposely put that into my lesson because it expands the idea of relative clauses rather than just using ‘who’. I wanted to put the emphasis on girls and boys because that brought the subject matter, the context, around to, the context. … I sometimes encouraged them to use the structure in the speed dating activity [a role play that came later in the lesson].

PHIONA: Like saying, ‘I like boys that are funny, are you funny?’ Like that?OLLIE: Yeah.PHIONA: OK, so before you taught this segment, had you, what, you said

you’d just learned relative clauses. What did you do to learn about relative clauses?

OLLIE: Asked another teacher.PHIONA: What did they say?OLLIE: They went the other way round, they said ‘the boy who was

[pause], green, who’ [pause]. I can’t remember. It seemed a very complicated way of using relative clauses, too complicated for teaching. You’d spend about ten minutes teaching that idea, that grammar. I just wanted to make it simple. It’s still a relative clause, it’s just not complicated.

PHIONA: Yeah. Because one of the students, he gives you. [pause] We might be able to hear him.

[Student’s voice, on the video] I like Photoshop that is useful and fun. OLLIE: Yeah, it’s a noun, isn’t it?PHIONA: Does that work?OLLIE: No, because it’s a noun, it should be a verb. And I did try to correct

but it’s difficult.PHIONA: OK, but laptops and Photoshop, they’re both nouns.OLLIE: Oh.PHIONA: So you can say, ‘laptops that are small and easy to carry’.OLLIE: Oh, it’s a common noun. Photoshop is a name, yeah.PHIONA: And about, because someone else gives you ‘I like football that is

interesting’.OLLIE: Yeah, I like playing football.PHIONA: I think you can say, ‘I like football that is interesting’.OLLIE: I suppose so, yeahPHIONA: What would it mean, if you did say that? [pause] If you said ‘I like

football that is interesting’?OLLIE: It’s very obscure, but you’re saying there’s many types of football

and you’re saying that I prefer football that is interesting, I prefer soccer or… so you’re making a comparison.


PHIONA: Yeah, so you can say, ‘I like football that is interesting’, so I like world cup games, I like international matches but I don’t like watching club football. So there’s lots of different types of football and I only like the stuff that is interesting.

OLLIE: Yeah.PHIONA: Yeah, because, like, for me, that’s what this type of relative clause

is all about. It’s, here’s the total sum of these things, but I only like that stuff that is, whatever it is. So it’s like you’ve got the total amount and then you’ve got the subset. Like in maths at school, you’ve got the sets and the subsets. Was it the idea that you were trying to get across?

OLLIE: Yeah, I was just trying to introduce the grammar element in the book, some way, in the lesson. [pause]

PHIONA: All right. OK another of the students gives you ‘I like software that are helpful’, what’s the problem there?

OLLIE: Eh, it should be ‘that is helpful’.PHIONA: Why?OLLIE: Well, because ‘software’ is a, do you call them compound nouns?

Things which are plural or which are singular. So software is, it’s singular. Is, yeah, it’s singular.

PHIONA: Uncountable?OLLIE: Yeah, uncountable.PHIONA: All right. It’s a minefield that exercise, isn’t it?OLLIE: Yeah, it is. So that’s why I tried to keep it as simple as possible.

Because, with these students you have to guide them through quite a lot with these grammar points, and keep it simple. … If we preview grammar points, keep ‘em simple so they can use them. If you spend too much time going over the grammar they’ll just yawn and go to sleep, so you need to make your lessons exciting, but also introduce grammar and give them some kind of structure or framework to use later on in the activities. … It may be awakening some kind of language they’ve already learned. So either they’ve heard it before or they’ve been taught it before, so you’re just bringing it back into focus.

(Ollie ‘interview’ 28/09/2007)

There are many issues here that I draw out in the study until the point of ‘theoretical saturation’ (Charmaz 2006). The teachers’ anxiety and confusion about grammar is the most obvious, but there is also the pressure from students to keep the grammar focus to a minimum (this is discussed in Chapters 6 and 7). The fact that Ollie asked another teacher for support is also significant and in Chapter 10 I discuss teacher professional development in the research site. Additionally, the ‘book’ that Ollie mentions, as a source of teaching content, is discussed and critiqued in Chapter 5. This excerpt therefore gives a flavour of the think aloud protocol used in the video-viewing interviews and also clarifies my role and ‘digging deeper’ process as a teacher educator as well as a researcher. In Chapter 12 I revisit the ethical stance of encouraging participants to question


their assumptions and, in so doing, enabling them to develop professionally by participating in the study.

Limitations of this study

The most conspicuously absent voices from this study are those of (more of) the Chinese co-teachers and (more of) the students. I did interview students and some local teachers of English, but a number of issues with this data make me aware that this is a ‘gap’ in the present research. This need not necessarily be problematic, though, as my focus is the foreign teachers’ perceptions and experiences rather than a 360-degree survey of the context. And it would be impossible to do justice to the nuance and variety of a range of Chinese voices without expanding the study significantly: just as it has taken me several hundred pages to (re)present nine Western teachers’ different points of view, it would be reductive not to give similar bandwidth to a wide range of local voices.

But the main stumbling block to constructing data with Chinese participants was my own positionality coupled with the dichotomous Self/Other binary that characterizes Chinese identity theorising (and ideology); this was discussed in Chapter 3. I have written elsewhere about the impact of my positionality and its effects on researching gender issues, particularly the constructed desirability of Western men among some young Chinese women:

[M]y ethnicity and age meant that I was very much a foreigner and a teacher rather than an insider. I heard many depersonalized accounts from the women students: their friends have (or want) foreign boyfriends, their friends experiment, their friends do this; they themselves are respectable. This is a performance. It allowed for the acknowledgement of truth but also the preservation of feminine respectability in front of a female interviewer.

(Stanley 2012b: 219)

In my data construction with Chinese teachers and students I experienced the same dilemma, which is primarily one of ethnicity: I am a foreigner in China. This meant that discussion of ‘foreign teachers’ was framed, always, as ‘you’ (including me) as compared to ‘us’ (as a generalized, homogenized Chinese Self). In the context, propriety and politeness meant performed praise and qualified qualms. In the minding of all these Ps and Qs, the ‘truth’ gets lost.

This makes it rather hard to take this data at face value. For instance, Hua, my Chinese co-teacher and I had lots of conversations about ‘foreign teachers’ and she was always very nice about the foreigners on staff that she had met. But she was very surprised to find out that I had an ELT background and qualifications, and kept coming back to it in conversation to confirm that, yes, in fact, I had been teaching longer than her, that I do speak other languages, and that I was not (what she seemingly thought of as) the ‘typical’ foreign teacher. This is very telling, although she did not actually tell me it. There is an issue here of data and dependability: do we believe her stated platitudes about ‘good’ foreign teachers,


or do we put more stock in her incredulity that I was a legitimate teacher? Such tensions made it difficult to include many Chinese voices in this study and it is my suggestion that (positioned, insider) Chinese researchers may wish to examine the ‘other side’ of this situation. In the meantime, I have addressed this dilemma by including a few Chinese voices, but I have avoided trying to survey the ‘bigger picture’ of what a heterogeneous range of Chinese people in this context think about it, as this is beyond the scope both of this study and also of my own positionality.

Conclusion

This chapter has provided access to my research process and I have described how I managed my own positionality. I have also described my data construction, analysis, and presentation, and have introduced the type of people I met and interviewed in Shanghai; more extensive introductions to the participant teachers appear in Chapter 5. A combination of trust between researcher and participants and also the cyclical data construction process in which I returned again and again to the same data in pursuit of deeper insights has allowed for participants’ own voices to tell their stories and to join me in analysing their experiences, thereby gaining something from the process as well. My use of participants’ voices to tell their own stories commences in Chapter 5, in which I introduce the work context, the biographies, and the beliefs, assumptions, and knowledge of the participant teachers.

5 Teachers, training, and teaching

This is the first of my ‘data’ chapters and it comprises my findings about the participant teachers and the context. The purpose of Chapter 5 is to provide a background to the stories that follow, so that the reader might contextualize the teachers’ experiences against their biographies and within the context in which they work. As there is little that can safely be assumed about ELT work contexts in China or elsewhere, I begin by outlining the professional, contextual, and contractual conditions for foreign teachers at PSU. Next, I discuss the organization of teachers’ work. The constraints that the teachers perceive are considered later in this chapter; these include lesson infrequency and repetitions, class sizes and layout, students’ mixed abilities, and the textbook. This allows for a background understanding of oral English teaching at PSU.

Foreign teachers at People’s Square University

People’s Square University (PSU; a pseudonym) is located on two campuses, one in suburban Shanghai and one in a satellite town an hour’s drive away. It is a publicly funded university and one of twelve administered by Shanghai Municipality. It is considered a ‘second tier university’ as it is not administered directly by the national Ministry of Education. However, while PSU is not an internationally ranked, research-focused university, it is well regarded: PSU ranks in the top hundred universities on the national list compiled by the Chinese Academy of Management Science (2009) of about 1,700 institutions of higher education nationally.

PSU offers four-year bachelor degree programs in more than seventy disciplines, including sciences, engineering, humanities, social sciences, education, music, and law, and masters and doctoral programs in principally humanities-based disciplines. Undergraduate admission to PSU is highly competitive and is dependent on the College Entrance Exam, which includes a non-oral English-language component. Most of the university’s 20,000+ undergraduates are from Shanghai municipality and surrounding provinces, and most live in dormitories on campus.

The English department at PSU comprises over 100 full-time staff, and all undergraduate students in any discipline study English. English teaching for


students of disciplines other than English is divided into macro-skill/language areas, as described in Chapter 2, with separate lessons in listening comprehension, ‘intensive reading’, writing, and oral English. Chinese teachers teach most classes, with foreign teachers teaching oral English.

The oral English teachers have a suite of offices at PSU separate from the Chinese English teachers. The oral English team comprises Leo (the Director of Studies for oral English), a Senior Teacher, an administrator here called Qing, and twelve teachers of whom seven are study participants: Ryan, Beth, Dan, Ollie, Mike, Claire, and Karen. Other PSU teachers that the participants mention in their interviewed included British teacher Ed (who taught at PSU in 2007–2008), American teacher Todd (2007–2009), and British teachers Liz, Jon, Alan, Sam, and Steph (2008–2009). As Phil manages several University Cooperation project teams he is based in central Shanghai not at PSU. The teachers each have their own workspaces and internet-linked computers in two staffrooms, called North and South, near the department office. Teachers’ meetings are held on Wednesday afternoons in the South staffroom, and all the teachers teach at the satellite campus all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays. As part of the University Cooperation project, the foreign teachers are allocated a Chinese ‘co-teacher’ with whom to work in partnership.

The foreign teachers are all on the same fulltime contracts with the same salaries and conditions, although Phil (the Academic Manager) and Leo (the Director of Studies) earn more on different contract types. The conditions of the standard teachers’ contracts are as follows. In 2007–2008, the teachers earned approximately 8000 RMB net per month (USD$1,170), and spent about 2500 RMB per month on housing, usually in shared apartments. Their contracts run for two semesters and include a return flight to the teacher’s home country at the beginning and end of the contract, and paid holidays. Work visas and health insurance are also arranged, and teachers receive an end-of-contract bonus of 8000 RMB. This package, including bonuses, adds up to approximately USD$18,000 annually and is considerably higher than a Chinese university teacher might expect to earn. (Where currency amounts are given, I have specified the currency as follows: USD$ = United States dollars; RMB = Chinese Yuan, called, in Chinese, RenMinBi.)

The students, who are mainly third year undergraduates, are young adults aged 20 to 23; there are no mature-age students in undergraduate programs at PSU. All are Chinese. All are non-English majors, studying disciplines as varied as engineering, sciences, education, and law. All have studied English for at least four years of senior high school (aged 15–18) and two years of university (aged 19–20), with most having studied some English at junior high school (aged 12–14) as well; thus most students have studied English for 8–10 years in total. Some students had also studied English in private language schools. Their English levels ranged from elementary to intermediate (approximately IELTS 2.0 to 4.5), although there was inconsistency across macro-skills, with students often having weaker speaking and listening skills and comparatively stronger reading skills. A few students were significantly more proficient in English, including most of

Teachers, training, and teaching 83

those who volunteered to be interviewed and/or take part in the ‘PSU students’ focus group in 2009.

Students are not grouped according to language proficiency so all the groups are mixed ability. Many students in the oral English classes had already successfully passed the College English Test (CET), which is the main English requirement compulsory for graduation. In addition, students at PSU also have to pass oral English. As each student has 80 minutes per week of oral English, in a group of 30–35 students, each teacher teaches 450–500 students per week, in 15 or so groups. A typical foreign teacher’s timetable is shown in Figure 5.1.

Most of the PSU oral English classes use the same textbook, which means that most of the teachers only have to plan and teach one lesson per week, as the same lesson can be repeated. In a few cases, however, the class either uses a different textbook or the group has a double lesson, and in these cases the teacher plans extension activities. The core lesson is planned at the Wednesday teachers’ meetings.

PSU classrooms are traditional school-style rooms, with 30–35 students sitting in rows and the teacher standing behind a lectern, often on a podium. In some classrooms the students’ chairs are fixed together as a bench, and in most there is very little extra space to turn furniture around (e.g. to create tables for small groups to work together). Each classroom has a chalkboard and the classrooms are equipped with fans but no heating; in summer it can get very hot while in winter the classrooms are very cold.

Teachers’ work at PSU

The textbook used for oral English is New Interchange 3 (J. C. Richards 1998). This is not an oral English course but a general textbook at intermediate level. Each student has a copy of the book and teachers each have the teacher’s book. The audio and video components of the course are not used. There is an expectation that teachers will actually use the textbook in class, partly to justify

Monday(citycampus)

Tuesday(satellite)

Wednesday(citycampus)

Thursday(satellite)

Session 1(8.00–9.20)

Group 1 Group 4 Group 8 Group 10 Group 14

Session 2(10.30–11.50)

Group 2 Group 5 Group 9 Group 11 Group 14(extension)

Session 3(13.30–14.50)

Group 6 Teachers’meeting

Group 12

Session 4(15.05–16.25)

Group 3 Group 7 Group 13

Friday(citycampus)

Figure 5.1 Typical foreign teacher timetable


the students having bought the book and in part to meet the university’s expectation that the oral English course is consistent across teachers and groups. The issue of whether and how to use the book was the subject of a lot of discussion and teacher complaints, with several teachers expressing their dissatisfaction with the suitability of material in the book for use in oral English classes. Indeed, much of the material does not aim to practise students’ oral English and I, too, found it difficult at times to adapt its mainly language-focused activities for speaking skills development. To some extent, attempts were made to show teachers how they could adapt the materials for use in oral English classes although this may have been an over-estimation of the teachers’ skills. In practice, most teachers used the New Interchange unit themes as the lesson themes but diverged in their activities and the aims of their lessons.

The syllabus divides New Interchange into one unit per lesson. However, as each textbook unit provides 4–7 hours’ of material (J. C. Richards 1998: vii) and the teachers only have 80 minutes per unit, there is a need to be selective. In addition, as there are 16 units in the book but 32 weeks of class, there are extra, non-textbook lessons built into the schedule, covering introductions, revision, seasonal lessons, and assessment. Figure 5.2 shows the first semester’s schedule, including both textbook and non-textbook lessons.

Another significant part of the oral teachers’ work at PSU is assessment, comprising both continuous assessment and end-of-semester examinations. The latter are based on discussion questions presented in the format of a board game, which students play in groups while their teacher monitors and grades their performance against six criteria: range, accuracy, fluency, coherence, interaction, and vocabulary; the first five are taken from the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. In-class speaking is also evaluated against these six criteria, and descriptors of these criteria are given to the oral English teachers at teacher induction. The assessment procedures changed twice during the two academic years I studied the PSU teachers, and many of the teacher development sessions covered the administration and grading of students’ oral assessments. Leo emphasized the importance of assessing students’ output throughout the course so as to take the pressure off the final two weeks of each semester and some teachers interpreted this to mean their role was mainly one of assessing students rather than teaching them.

Week Content Week Content1 Introductions 9 Unit 52 Introductions 10 Unit 63 Unit 1 11 Unit 74 Unit 2 12 Unit 85 Unit 3 13 Revision – Units 5–86 Unit 4 147 Revision – Units 1–4 15 Assessment8 Halloween-themed lesson 16 Assessment

Christmas-themed lesson

Figure 5.2 Semester 1 syllabus


Meet the participan

In Chapter 4, I presendiscussed, that informacontrast, in this sectiopurpose of this sectionstories. All dates and ag

Phil

Phil is a 34-year-old maalthough ‘third generatiohis father grew up in Magraduating, spent some a record company, althoELT Certificate with thefirst at a summer school iin Shanghai he taught Eexperienced Malaysian tmoved into corporate layears. He moved to ABCStudies at PSU then as thproject. Through his eTESOL Diploma, whichhis (Chinese) wife and thHe is passionate about sohad been in Shanghai fo

Leo

Leo is a 29-year-old Vagrew up as a bilingual Chimself Chinese-Canadiidentity, as he ‘acts nothidentities give him ‘the Canadian university andmanager for a confectiundertaken a short coralthough he says it taumarketing job in 2003Shanghai, saying that experienced teacher. Leowith people rather than2004 and had just beeprogram when I began where he owns an apart

ts

ted basic biographical data about the participants. As tion was necessarily essentialized so as to be tabular. In n the participant teachers introduce themselves. The is to introduce the individuals, their voices, and their es refer to August 2007, unless otherwise stated.

n from Liverpool who describes himself as half Chinese, n Chinese’ as his paternal grandparents were Chinese and

uritius. He studied Education at a British university and, on time as a professional musician as his band was signed with ugh ‘little came of it in the end’. After this he undertook an intention of travelling overseas to teach English, teaching n the UK before going to Shanghai in 2000. In his first year nglish reading and writing skills in a university, where an eacher that Phil greatly admired mentored him. He then nguage training where he taught business English for four

English in 2004, initially as the oral English Director of e Academic Manager for the whole University Cooperation mployment at ABC English Phil undertook the Trinity he completed in late 2008. Phil is settled in Shanghai with eir young child, and they have bought an apartment there. ccer and music, reads widely, and speaks good Chinese. He

r seven years when I began the data collection.

ncouver man whose parents are from Shanghai and who hinese/English speaker. In 2007 interviews, he described an, but said he is ‘always in conflict’ with himself over his ing like a Chinese person’. He concludes that these dual best of both worlds’. He has a Marketing degree from a went to Shanghai in 2001 to work as an assistant brand onary company, a job he held for two years. Leo had respondence-based ELT course before leaving Canada, ght him ‘mainly terminology’. He resigned from his

and began teaching at an English language school in he learned to teach there by being mentored by an says he likes teaching because he prefers to ‘communicate

a computer’. Leo had taught oral English at PSU since n promoted to Director of Studies of the oral English my fieldwork in August 2007. He is settled in Shanghai ment and has a local girlfriend.


Dan

Dan is a 38 year-old American man who has committed himself to a career teaching English overseas. His academic background includes studying Theatre and English on a scholarship at an American university, before working in ‘a little bit of everything’, including acting, temporary office work, Information Technology (IT), and gardening. As part of his IT job, Dan spent several months in India, which he says gave him the desire to live and work overseas. In 2003 he went to Thailand on holiday, loved it, and decided to investigate moving to Thailand to ‘live and work in that culture’. He encountered negativity among friends and family but persevered, and finally undertook a full-time TEFL International Certificate in Thailand in 2006, before teaching children in Thailand for nine months. He moved to PSU in January 2007 and had been teaching there for a semester when I began collecting data. Although Dan had worked in China for a semester when the data was collected, he says he ‘hasn’t fallen in love with China’, and says he would teach in Laos, Cambodia, or India ‘in a heartbeat’. In January 2008 Dan moved to Cambodia and then, in August 2008, returned to PSU as the oral English Senior Teacher. He has expressed an interest in undertaking a further qualification in ELT and reads widely on ELT theory and practice.

Ollie

Ollie is a 40 year-old man from Kent, England, who had been at PSU for a semester before I began data collection and who had taught English in Thailand for 18 months before arriving in China. His academic background is in visual arts; he has a degree in Fine Art. Following this, he qualified as an art teacher and said he enjoyed the teaching practice element of his course although he never worked as an art teacher and, instead, worked ‘mainly in offices’. After making Japanese friends in London he decided to go to Asia to teach English and undertook a TEFL International Certificate in Thailand. Following this, he taught children in Thailand and worked as a teacher trainer on the TEFL International course itself and on courses for local teachers of English. As part of this job he taught a short methodology course in southern China to local primary school teachers and this sparked his interest in working in China. He says he plans to stay in China for at least a few years, and intends to stay in ELT as his career, although he doubts whether he will undertake further ELT qualifications, as this is ‘a question of money’. In June 2008 Ollie moved to another University Cooperation project university, also in Shanghai, as the Senior Teacher.

Karen

Karen is a 23-year-old woman who grew up in London and Wales. She graduated in English Literature from a British university and worked briefly in insurance, journalism, and youth work before undertaking the Cambridge CELTA in


Bristol. After this, she worked for six months as an English language teacher at a UK language school teaching European and Middle Eastern adult students. Karen describes herself as ‘a bit of a bookworm’ although she says she is also interested in travelling and meeting people, and had met a circle of friends within weeks of arriving in Shanghai in August 2007. This group included a Portuguese-Chinese man who became her boyfriend. In July 2008 Karen left PSU and began work at the Shanghai campus of a French university, where she taught English language and contributed to the marketing of courses to international students.

Mike

Mike is a 26 year-old man whose parents are Chinese, and who grew up as a monolingual English speaker in London. Following ‘A’ levels in art, psychology, and mathematics, he studied Artificial Intelligence at a British university, although he says he regrets his choice of subject as he missed the variety of his ‘A’ level subjects and wishes he had studied something ‘more written based, like English’. After graduating from university he undertook an ELT Certificate in the UK before teaching for a year at PSU. He then returned to England where he worked as a computer games tester although he said the job ‘wasn’t going to go anywhere’. During this time Mike also applied for courses to train as an IT high school teacher although he then decided to ‘come back out’ to Shanghai for another year because doing so would be ‘just so much easier than staying in England’. By August 2007, Mike had been working at PSU for two years. Since arriving in Shanghai, Mike has become a confident Chinese speaker and has committed time to studying Chinese in the university holidays. Mike left Shanghai in January 2008.

Claire

Claire is a 23 year-old woman from Leicester, UK. She studied Sociology and Social Policy at a British university, a course she says she loved, then worked in ‘random temping jobs’ to pay off university debt before deciding to take a CertTESOL in the UK with the aim of living overseas. She undertook the course with her British-Japanese partner, Craig, who is fluent in Chinese. Claire then worked in temporary jobs for a few months in the UK before joining Craig in Shanghai. Claire taught English language for six months at a Shanghai primary school and says of this time ‘I don’t think I could ever have lived out here if it hadn’t been for Craig making life initially so easy for me’. She then returned to the UK where she worked as a teaching assistant for six months while applying for postgraduate degrees in law, although she withdrew before commencing as she was worried about the debt she would incur through further study and because she missed Craig and Shanghai. She also expressed frustration over her inability to find a ‘graduate job’ in the UK during this time. Claire started at PSU when I started my fieldwork there. She says she does not see herself staying in ELT long term, but that she may consider teaching sociology in the UK one day. Claire left Shanghai in July 2008.


Beth

Beth is a 29 year-old Texan woman who holds a BA in Psychology and an MA in Anthropology, in which she mapped the telling of Mexican ghost stories in the southern USA. She is currently undertaking a PhD in Folklore, looking at the influence of traditional Japanese and Chinese stories, such as the Monkey King, on modern popular culture in East Asia. She has taught social science in American universities and plans to research and teach folklore and anthropology in an American university when she completes her PhD. She is teaching English at PSU with the intention of learning Chinese language and observing Chinese popular culture, having spent the previous four years learning Japanese in the USA. Beth’s pre-departure ELT training was on the Concordia University (California) International Studies course, which included a brief ELT component but primarily content about China. Beth describes herself as ‘a kind of dork’ who likes books, video games, and ‘obscure bits of knowledge’. She loves animals, has worked as a veterinary technician, and has brought her black standard poodle with her to China. Beth arrived in Shanghai at the same time as I did, in August 2007.

Ryan

Ryan is a 27-year-old Canadian man without a pre-service qualification in ELT but with three years’ English teaching experience in Taiwan before starting at PSU, which he did shortly before I started my fieldwork there in August 2007. He is bilingual in French and English through schooling and he has a Canadian university degree in International Relations. He describes his degree, which included East Asia studies courses, as a chance to ‘learn about the world at university’. He was a good student, with straight ‘A’s in his final year subjects, and he describes his degree as ‘a lot of fun’. Describing his post-university path, he says, ‘I thought I could increase my education better on my own, by actually going out and experiencing, so that’s what I’m doing’. Since arriving in Asia he has become fluent in Chinese. Ryan is fascinated by languages and cultures and has travelled extensively in China and South East Asia during breaks in his teaching.

Teachers’ paradigms

In this section I examine the participant teachers’ interactions with their initial ELT courses and consider other influences on their teaching. I begin with the teaching paradigms of Karen, Claire, and Mike, all of whom are recent university graduates with four-week ELT certificates and little or no pre-PSU experience. Then I consider Ollie and Dan, both of whom had worked in other industries before undertaking the four-week TEFL International Certificate in Thailand. Both then taught English to children in Thailand before moving to PSU in January 2007. I then describe the backgrounds and teaching beliefs of Ryan and


Beth, neither of whom holds a formal ELT certificate qualification. Both have successfully learned other languages both through formal instruction and as a result of immersion in target-language communities. In addition, they are the products of successful North American university experiences: both were ‘straight A’ undergraduate students and Beth is undertaking a PhD.

Karen

Karen undertook a five-week intensive version of the CELTA in Bristol, UK, and was subsequently employed at the language school in which she had taken the course. Karen describes her work there as a continuation of her learning from the CELTA and says she feels, in some ways, ‘too prepared’ for teaching at PSU, in that her training included competencies she does not require, including language analysis and grammar teaching. More than most of the PSU oral English teachers that I observed, Karen’s lessons contain ‘target language’ input as well as oral skills practice. In her lessons, Karen focused extensively on vocabulary development but also incorporated reading and writing development, often using authentic materials such as English language newspapers.

Claire

Claire did a CertTESOL course in the UK and describes its intensity as ‘ridiculously hard’ but says it was also a ‘most amazing experience’ in which she learned a lot. In common with almost all the participants, Claire identifies grammar as her weakness, saying that she ‘doesn’t know grammar rules’ and that this was difficult on the CertTESOL as ‘the whole point of each lesson was a particular grammar focus’. She compares this to oral English teaching, saying the latter is ‘easier in many ways’.

In addition to language and language skills outcomes, Claire identifies creativity development as a desirable learning outcome for PSU students. She says, ‘our activities encourage students to use their imagination … [which is] very hard for Chinese learners … [as it’s] alien to their educational background’. She sees legitimizing and developing students’ creativity as one of the goals of having Western teachers at PSU, and sees her role as one of providing students with enthusiasm, motivation, and the opportunity to practise their English. This was borne out in her lessons, where Claire encouraged students to use their imagination in creative role-plays. She contrasts her approach to Chinese English teaching, which she describes as controlled practice of grammar points and learning English ‘in Chinese’.

Mike

Discussing context-appropriateness of the training course for working in China, Mike remembered a course trainer saying ‘if you go to China they won’t have brothers and sisters, so you’ve got to be a bit sensitive about that’ and ‘you can’t


say too much about the [Chinese] government’. Mike concedes that these are somewhat superficial cultural notes rather than an attempt to help trainees adjust the teaching styles learned on the course to Chinese classrooms, but he does not seem to have found this problematic. Instead, he says that communicative language teaching ‘works’ in China:

If you get ‘em young. If they’re like, thirty, then, they’re like, ‘what are we doing?’ Like, ‘we have to stand up and talk?!’ But with the children [that I taught over summer] … it wasn’t a problem. They were always up for group activities and slapping boards and stuff [‘board slap’ is a vocabulary matching game]. At the university, I think [our teaching style] works, yeah, it probably takes ‘em a couple of weeks to get used to.

(Mike ‘interview’ 13/09/2007)

Mike is the most experienced ordinary teacher at PSU. He is confident in the classroom, enjoys a warm rapport with his students, and incorporates lots of student-centred group work and a central activity or student performance in each lesson. He says he aims to reduce teacher talk time and increase student talk time.

Dan

Dan appears to have been very well prepared before starting his TEFL International course, having ‘done some homework’ including all the recommended reading. As a result, perhaps, he found the course less demanding than he had expected and wished for a stronger theoretical basis. Dan is serious about developing as a teacher and expresses frustration with colleagues who are not:

I really wanted to talk about what had happened in class and a lot of the teachers didn’t want to, they were too busy. … [Talking things over] helps me talk through ideas. I’m still quite weak at coming in, sitting down, banging out a lesson plan, saying ‘this, and this, and this’. If I’m doing it verbally, the ideas come out more, it helps me. [Other teachers] they complain about something I have a similar problem with, we can bounce ideas off each other, maybe we’ll find something.

(Dan ‘interview’ 11/09/2007)

Dan is an engaging teacher and says that as well as aiming to have the students practise English he also tries to catch their attention. Dan cites his use of humour in part as a contrast to an experience he had at PSU:

I watched a Chinese English teacher teaching his class, and it was frightening…He had a phonemic chart up on the overhead [projector], and it’s like [speaking in] ‘Chinese, Chinese, Chinese’, uses his pointer, ‘Chinese, Chinese, Chinese. What’s the first one? [imitates teacher’s voice]: eee’, [imitates students’ voices]: ‘eee’, [teacher]: ‘eee’, [students]: ‘eee’,


[teacher]: ‘eee’, [students]: ‘eee’. ‘Chinese, Chinese, Chinese, [teacher]: eh’, [students]: ‘eh’, [teacher]: ‘eh’, [students]: ‘eh’. And then he went, like, he didn’t even do it in the sections, like the diphthongs and the vowels, he just went straight across the line and started the second line, and I’m like, ‘holy crap’. This is pretty much what they get … like, I might tell an extra joke or two today.


In contrast to this, Dan’s classroom presence is engaging and he made use of mainly controlled language practice activities, although there was no language clarification or correction as would be expected in CELTA-type lessons.

Ollie

Explaining his choice of TEFL International in Thailand, Ollie described his difficulty in being accepted onto a CELTA/CertTESOL course:

I’d tried to get on courses in London but getting on a TEFL course in England is not very easy, there aren’t many courses available, [and] the selection process is very difficult, you have to have prior teaching experience … I tried to get into three or four different places.


As these are pre-service courses for which there is no pre-requisite of teaching experience, Ollie’s non-acceptance on several courses is a frank admission. Both courses have rigorous selection procedures to ensure that the vast majority of those accepted eventually pass. As there are 24 CELTA and five CertTESOL centres in London alone, Ollie’s difficulty in being accepted is perhaps indicative of the weak language awareness he demonstrated in the interview excerpt in Chapter 4. In addition, he seems to have little conception of second language learning and therefore students’ needs. As a CELTA trainer, and having interviewed many prospective course participants, I would be hesitant to accept him onto CELTA as I believe he would struggle to meet pass criteria.

In common with most of the participants, though, Ollie does not primarily see his role as that of a grammar teacher, and says that his objective in the classroom is to get the students to speak in English and to ‘coax out’ students’ knowledge. Ollie describes the foreign teachers’ teaching objectives at PSU as:

We’re not, in a way, trying to teach them. We’re trying to facilitate and, we’re trying to present to them situations in which they can use their language … they have this wealth of English grammatical knowledge and this wealth of words, which they hardly use. … The students have hardly any exposure to laowai [foreigners].



Beth

Whenever Beth discusses her ELT practice and the rationale behind classroom events, she does so with more reference to her own background of learning German and Japanese, and of the influence of colleagues and managers at PSU, than she does in terms of her learning from her ELT training at Concordia. This is particularly noticeable when she discusses affect, integrative motivation, and classroom dynamics. Beth therefore seems to regard her own language learning experience as the strongest influence on her teaching, a perception she confirmed.

As an example of motivation and classroom affect, Beth says she aims to reduce students’ inhibitions in using English. She attributes this to her own experience of teachers who pressurized students to produce language before they were ready, and who were over-critical of resultant language errors. Coupled with pressure from PSU management, particularly Leo, to make oral English lessons enjoyable, this belief results in Beth placing great emphasis on her lessons being ‘fun’. A second priority for Beth is fluency. She attributes students’ lack of fluency to the ways in which they had been taught English before entering her class. She says:

The students have never had to really speak English in a natural way, they’ve only had to recite things. … they know the rules but they have had no practice. … You can have as much theoretical knowledge as you want, but until you actually have to start putting together sentences and saying them to other people it doesn’t really make sense, at least it doesn’t for me.

(Beth ‘interview’ 17/10/2007)

Beth appears to recognize that Chinese students, while they may have a large knowledge about English, often lack the speaking skills and confidence to use the language communicatively.

Ryan

Ryan did not undertake pre-service training before starting teaching English in a Taiwanese buxiban (extra-curricular language school) and this section is rather longer than that of the other teachers as his teaching is influenced by a number of factors. Having never studied English language, but as an English-French bilingual, Ryan describes grammar as an area he has learned about mainly through teaching English. He gives the example of teaching articles (Chinese does not use articles), and says:

You start to think, ‘what does ‘the’ really mean? When would I use ‘the’ and when would I use ‘a’?’ … And you go through in your head and you go, ‘well I would use ‘the’ when I’m talking about a specific one’. Of course they’re not going to understand ‘specific’, so you’ve got to think of a way to make them understand ‘specific’, think of a way to make ‘specific’ clear but not actually say ‘specific’, like, come up with different examples … like, I


need a [whiteboard] marker. And I’d have, like, a red, a black, a green and a blue marker. ‘I need a marker’. And I, like, close my eyes and just pull out any marker. Then I’d be like, ‘now I need the red marker’. Right, so I’d be, like, ‘the red marker’.

(Ryan ‘interview’ 20/09/2007)

This example, to me, is a sound analysis of articles (at elementary level, as Ryan was teaching) and an efficient clarification using resources available. However, Ryan’s language analysis evidenced in his observed lessons was less convincing, in part because his unplanned lessons meant he had to produce impromptu language explanations. For example, Ryan based an observed lesson around a list of ‘conjunctions’ that were actually relative pronouns and possessive adjectives; students questioned the accuracy of several of his explanations (Ryan ‘observed lesson’ 14/09/2007).

I was also unconvinced by Ryan’s understanding of second language macro-skills acquisition and his understanding of the difference between oral and written English. This was evidenced in Ryan’s classroom activities, in which students often wrote sentences to read aloud rather than producing oral English; Ryan seemed to be unaware of differences in output types:

RYAN: English is primarily a spoken – a spoken, oral language. Right? Like, that, it comes from, like, the history of it, it was spoken first and then written. Right? Chinese, as a language, was written first and then spoken. Do you see what I’m saying? So they focus a lot on the reading and writing, in Chinese, and very little on the speaking and listening. Right? But English you have to be able, like, if you speak English you, like, reading and writing comes kind of, like, second nature. All you have to know is that 26-letter alphabet, which has a song, and then you’re set.

PHIONA: Is it? I mean, if you’re a good speaker you’re a good writer?RYAN: Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, because if you’re a good speaker you can use

the words properly, right? What else do you really need to do for writing?PHIONA: Well, written text is organized differently from spoken text.RYAN: Uh, not at the level that they’re at.


Ryan’s own spoken text above is a good example of how spoken English differs from written English, featuring, as it does, redundancies, reformulations, fillers, and partial-sentence utterances. This is not ‘bad’ English; it is an example of the natural spoken dialogic English of two native English speakers in an interview genre. Ryan may therefore find it difficult to be effective as a teacher of oral English, as his stated belief is that oral English is, effectively, the same as written English spoken aloud.

However, Ryan describes his purpose not as teaching oral English but as, firstly, evaluating students’ English and, secondly, motivating them. He clarifies the latter point as motivating the students to want to argue their opinions, as this


is a pragmatic norm in the English language discourse communities, including academia, of which Ryan has been a member. Describing a PSU lesson, Ryan says:

It was great today, I had, like, two girls in the class arguing with each other over the grammar pattern that was on the board and trying to tell me why I should take points away from this group and take points away from that group. And I was like, ‘yes!’ You know what I mean? I’m like, ‘good, they’re at each other’s throats’.


Why Ryan should value students who are ‘at each other’s throats’ is not immediately clear, but he contextualizes this within the context of his own university studies, in which ‘if you didn’t argue like that in class you wouldn’t get a good mark. You have to jump up in class and argue like that’. So Ryan appears to conceive his role as including the teaching of pragmatics that he perceives are appropriate, based on his own student experience in Canada.

Teacher induction and support at PSU

New foreign teachers start yearlong contracts at the beginning of each PSU semester, and all foreign teachers attend teacher induction each semester. Induction comprises team building of returning and new teachers and their Chinese co-teachers, and a series of teacher development/training workshops conducted mainly by Leo and Phil; topics covered are mainly administrative but there are also sessions on, for example, classroom activities. Induction is followed throughout the year with monthly teacher development workshops.

In addition to these, a teachers’ meeting is held every Wednesday afternoon to plan the New Interchange lesson for the next week. Each week a different teacher leads the meeting, presenting a pre-prepared lesson plan for discussion. The lesson planning sheet for these is divided into columns, headed: ‘activity’, ‘language focus’, and ‘aim’ although lesson and activity aims are rarely included or discussed. The Wednesday meetings are lively, with teachers’ concerns about the lesson plan usually relating to two themes: ‘how are you going to kill 80 minutes?’ and ‘are the students going to go for this?’

Although the foreign teachers ostensibly teach oral English, the New Interchange textbook is organized around grammar points and there is some pressure at the Wednesday lesson planning meetings to incorporate a grammar point in each lesson. However, there seems to be a lot of confusion as to the role grammar teaching might play in oral English lessons. As a result grammar is dealt with in a very cursory way by most of the teachers.

In terms of providing exposure to, and student output of, spoken English, the teachers can be said to be better prepared. All but Beth said they felt confident setting up student-centred speaking activities, although none were very successful in handling large classes with discipline and motivation problems, including the issue of


students speaking in Chinese during oral fluency activities or simply not participating at all. Crucially, most participants appear to have internalized the principle that, in developing oral fluency, the students should do most of the talking rather than the teacher, although the observation data contradicted this stated belief as some teachers, particularly Beth, Leo, and Ollie, used a teacher-led plenary format for most of their lessons. There is also an issue with the nature of student output, with some confusion as to whether the students’ uttering de-contextualized, and perhaps well-known/formulaic single words or learned phrases ‘counts’ as oral English.

Leo’s role as Director of Studies is a hybrid of a manager and a teacher mentor role, and his input on teaching matters is most obvious at the Wednesday planning meetings and teacher development workshops. However, Leo himself sees his role as ‘more of a manager than a teacher’ (‘interview’ 30/05/2008), and says his job is ‘making sure the wheels are turning’ (Leo ‘interview’ 11/06/2009). This is confirmed by two incidents described by Beth and Ryan. Beth describes asking Leo for support with a difficult class:

This was the class Ed taught last semester and he absolutely loathed them, just hated them. And I hated them at first too … they were all like 19 [years old]. Freshmen. And they saw me, and like, 30, yeah, ancient, and they’d no way to relate to me, foreign stupid class, they didn’t even want to play games. … And I told Leo I was having all this trouble with them [and] he said, ‘it doesn’t matter, you’re just going to have to go in there and get through it.’


Similarly, Ryan describes an incident in which a student’s marks were overturned; this is described in more detail in Chapter 11:

[I said] ‘Leo, what is the point of me doing all this work and evaluating the students if you’re just going to change the marks later? Why don’t I just give you all my stuff [marks sheets] and take the rest of the week off?’ Leo snickers at me as though I’m trying to use this as an opportunity to weasel out of work and said, ‘You’re here because you’re getting paid to be here.’

(Ryan ‘e-mail’ 10/06/2008)

In both these incidents Leo appears to be constructing his role as one of ensuring the teachers are working as per their contracts rather than helping them find solutions when their work becomes difficult. Leo’s perception of his role and accountability are explored in Chapter 7.

Circumstantial constraints on effective teaching

This section examines issues that the participants feel are constraints on effective teaching in the context. These include: lesson repetitions, lesson infrequency, class size and layout, students’ mixed abilities, and the textbook. As described above, each participant teacher teaches approximately 15 different groups of


students per week, and are expected to repeat the same lesson with each class. The teachers have mixed feelings about the ‘repetitions’ issue, with most appreciating the reduced lesson planning load but disliking the repetitive nature of teaching at PSU. Claire explains:

In terms of that, kind of, valuing yourself and your own mental health, I think I can’t hack this for a whole year; I want something else. … [the repetitions] make me feel brain dead. I’m actually standing there just feeling more like it’s a script because I’ve taught it so many times … But it is so hard to change it if it’s working. … People have said to me ‘well, can’t you do different things with different groups?’ And yeah, potentially you could. … But you just think, ‘well, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’. … I end up standing there thinking ‘oh, have I done this? No, that was with the class this morning’. … It’s so hard to balance out, because, on the one hand, … I’ve got my evenings free, I’ve got my weekends pretty much free and that’s really nice, who wouldn’t want a job like that? … But it just drives you mad repeating and repeating. I just think it’s bad for you, you know? It just feels like a factory chain, and you’re just churning them out and trying to tick one off your list and get to the end of the day.

(Claire ‘interview’ 30/05/2008)

To some extent the teachers did talk about their development of the lesson throughout the week, and this system might be used to encourage reflective, developmental teaching, with guidance. But all the participant teachers, including Leo and Phil, see the sheer number of repetitions of the same 80-minute lesson as problematic. The scheduling of 15 groups per teacher per week also means teachers teach up to 500 students per week. This means that they cannot get to know them or even learn all their names. Several teachers commented on this:

We have them for one hour twenty minutes once a week, so altogether that’s not very much time over the course [less than 40 hours in total]. And if you think about how much of that’s spent with, you know, setting things up and faffing around, you’re losing, like, ten minutes [of each lesson] straight away, and there’s so many of them [students in each class] … I do try and teach them but I don’t feel like I’m spending enough time with them. I can’t even remember most of their names.

(Karen ‘interview’ 29/05/2008)

You know, if I was seeing this class tomorrow I could have made some observations and spent the first part of the class talking about them, maybe ‘can you analyse your role play?’ that kind of thing. But there’s no follow-through, all the lessons stand-alone. … A lesson has to be contained within itself.



I think if I had the opportunity to see them more than once a week then I probably would be a bit more effective, but I wouldn’t say that I’m that effective from having them once a week.


In addition to the infrequency of the lessons, relatively large class sizes make it difficult for the teachers to get to know individuals, a problem Beth sums up: ‘the class is entirely too large for us to be effective’ (Beth ‘interview’ 03/06/2009). Claire explains how this distances the teachers:

It is hard with the size of the class to know how effective you’re being for everyone. I think you can, within each activity, you can get a general sense of people participating and responding in the way that you want them to, being creative and, you know, shouting out answers and just going along with the flow of the lesson the way you anticipated.


Phil also wondered if the class size might affect teaching styles:

Maybe also that role, that master of ceremonies-type role, it’s terra firma, it’s a way that new teachers deal with the audience-like feeling of the large classroom. … It looks and feels to them like they’re making a speech at a wedding, that’s what it feels like.

(Phil ‘interview’ 19/10/2007)

A related problem is that of students’ mixed abilities; students are not streamed into classes by level but are grouped according to the university timetable. This creates a situation where all classes have a range of abilities, some spanning elementary to upper intermediate levels. Leo comments:

That’s one of the problems that happens in our classes, you’ll have one or two people that speak very good English, and then one big block, and then you’ll have four or five that just don’t speak English at all.

(Leo ‘interview’ 30/05/2008)

Given students’ very mixed abilities, any textbook in this situation would necessarily be a compromise. But there is a requirement that teachers use New Interchange (Richards, 1998), if only for the theme of each week’s lesson. All the teachers commented on the textbook, with most saying they find it difficult to use but that as the students have bought the book they feel they have to use it. This was a frequent topic at Wednesday lesson planning meetings. Phil comments:

Much maligned though the books are, the basic themes of all of the units are fairly universal but I do see teachers and students struggling to use the books


and trying to use them too literally in the belief that the objective is solely what the book says it is.

(Phil ‘e-mail’ 14/08/2008)

Phil’s last point about whose fault this might be is intriguing, as the teachers he says are ‘struggling’ are unlikely to be equipped by ELT-certificate training to be able to adapt materials for a new purpose, such as making oral activities from grammar lessons. This is discussed further in Chapter 10.

Conclusion

It is my hope that, after having read Chapter 5, the reader has some understanding of the challenge the teachers face at PSU. The complexity is in part due to teachers’ limited training background but also to their attempts to make sense of their purpose in the context. As will be explored in Chapter 6, the oral English teachers’ role is never adequately clarified, and the participants have a variety of beliefs about what they should be doing in class. To some extent the teachers’ role is constructed by Phil and Leo’s academic management, support, and induction. However, there is some confusion even among the academic management as to the teachers’ aims. This uncertainty of purpose is revisited in more depth in Chapters 8 and 10.

While most of the participants hold entry-level teaching qualifications, many are primarily influenced by non-training experiences including their own language learning. The teachers’ beliefs and assumptions are, then, a mixed bag of training-derived priorities, such as oral fluency practice, and influences from teachers’ own ‘apprenticeship of observation’, such as creativity development. Teachers also appear to be influenced to some extent by the deficiencies they perceive in Chinese education. So the various teachers understand their role differently at PSU. This is unsurprising as the role is never clearly defined, and there are myriad competing constructions of what oral English can and should be in the context. The construct of ‘oral English’ is discussed in the next chapter.

6 Understanding oral English

This chapter considers what oral English teaching actually is. In the absence of a written job description, the role is constructed by teachers’ and students’ perceptions and other situational realities. Teachers’ and students’ paradigms about language and language learning form the de facto curriculum. This means that the teachers’ role, and oral English itself, is a complex product of factors. This chapter explores these factors and their impact.

Factors that influence the role include different stakeholders’ understandings of the purpose of education, the nature of language, and the nature of second language learning. There are also situational factors that influence the way oral English plays out at PSU. These include its place in the wider ELT curriculum, its assessment backwash, its stated and implied purpose, and the teachers’ lack of a clear job description. Combined, these understandings and situational factors affect the way oral English teaching occurs in practice. Within this nexus of unstated assumptions, differing underlying views, and constraints, the teachers and students do manage to meet each week and engage in something called oral English.

The final task of this chapter is to consider what happens when they do so. In particular, I explain Phil’s methodological sleight of hand in which he disguises oral fluency development as controlled language practice. This model is important because it was the basis of much of the teacher support given at Wednesday planning meetings. The extent to which newly trained teachers can make use of this model to be effective at PSU is an important discussion that is continued in Chapter 10.

But oral English practice varies significantly between teachers, who can be positioned along two conceptual axes. The first axis is the type of student output, and I describe a continuum of utterance types ranging from very tightly controlled language output (e.g. drills) along to linguistically uncontrolled, meaning-focused output (e.g. discussions). The second axis is classroom interaction patterns, and I distinguish teachers’ practice along a continuum of student-centred to teacher-centred classroom interactions. I then re-visit the two axes of variance, showing these as a conceptual model in Figure 6.1.


The nature and purpose of tertiary education

Several of the teachers commented on their perceptions of the nature and purpose of students’ experience at PSU, contrasting it to their own experiences of Western universities. They observed that the vast majority of PSU undergraduates live in dormitories on campus and all are under 25 years old. Teachers also commented on the more regimented nature of student life at PSU: timetables are very structured, with many more hours of classes per week than might be expected in a Western university. Consequently, students have less time for part-time jobs and hobbies. In addition, Chinese students’ disciplines are dependent less on personal choice than on their College Entrance Exam results. Beth describes one of her students:

He’s a civil engineering major, and he said he didn’t like his major, he wouldn’t like his job when he graduated, and he hoped that one day he could find a hobby he liked so maybe he would get some enjoyment out of his life.


Thus, while university dominates students’ lives, some may not be engaged by their studies. Leo explained his perception:

If you talk to the students here, their response will be ‘our classes are very boring, they’re conducted in a very boring way, we’re not really learning anything’. In the other [Chinese teachers’] classes, I observed one the other day, there were 80 students and I was the only person taking notes and listening to the teacher. Everyone else was reading newspapers, listening to MP3 [players], chatting on the phone. The teachers don’t care.


Large class sizes, such as the 80 students Leo mentions, are possible because there is little expectation that students will participate. The foreign teachers perceive this is because ‘good’ teaching is seen as something the teacher does ‘like a show’ (Phil ‘interview’ 05/10/2007). As discussed in Chapter 2, large class sizes and teacher-fronted interactions may be explainable with reference to China’s Confucian-heritage culture of learning.

But there may also be political issues (Feng 2006), and Phil explains his perception:

[Chinese education] might be a perversion of original Confucian teaching … Originally, Confucianism would expect people to really think about the answer. They might be provided with an answer by a teacher figure, but the expectation would be then to think about that and apply it to their own context, which I’m not sure that is the way it’s being done at the moment. At the moment it’s more about feeding in ‘correct’ answers.


Understanding oral English 101

As the teaching at PSU seems to assume a teacher-centred transmission model, some of the participant teachers noted a contrast between this and their constructions of education as empowering and legitimizing. Ollie describes his experience of a more ‘liberal atmosphere’ in Western education, where ‘students have some kind of interaction with the teacher and there’s greater equality between students and teachers’ (Ollie ‘interview’ 14/09/2007). Similarly, Ryan comments on a difference in terms of students’ accountability for their own learning, referring to his own student experience:

The [PSU] students aren’t really geared towards the university thing, because our whole thing in the West at university is that you go in, and it’s your education, it’s your responsibility, you basically get out of it what you put into it. Whereas here, like … for the most part, especially the ones who are just not into it … there’s not really any incentive for them to, you know, like, push to improve themselves.


These perceived differences in students’ experiences may be explainable by perceptions of the purpose of a university education. Leo explains:

[The students] they studied very hard when they were in high school, to get into a good university. … [but] the Chinese education system is very different from Western education systems, because in the West you can get into university relatively easily but for you to graduate you really need to get good marks and be good at exams, but for uni here, if you get in, unless you don’t show up to classes, it’s almost guaranteed you will graduate. So the challenge is getting in.


Leo’s observations are explained by Xiaoli, a PSU student:

The Chinese teachers do not care if students read magazines, discuss the weekend; they do it all the time. University is the time to relax, only the degree matters. It’s just: ‘which university?’ ‘Do you have guanxi [connections]?’ ‘Are you a [Communist] Party member?’ It matters for promotion, for jobs.

(Xiaoli ‘interview’ 18/10/2007)

It appears that the fact of having been to a good university is perceived by students and employers to be more important, perhaps as a social filter, than the graduate qualities developed as a result of higher education. Phil explains:

University is just a replica of high school for the next age up … and, to an extent I think [the students] still perceive themselves as minors. … It’s the semantics of the word ‘university’, because, to a Western ear we have this


very fixed image of what a university is, and it’s not the same in China. The way the word is used to represent an establishment called a university is not the same … it’s more like a higher high school.


Chinese language supports this interpretation: primary education is xiao xue, literally ‘little school’; secondary education, for students aged 12–18, is zhong xue (‘middle school’, and often mistranslated as such), and tertiary education is da xue (‘big school’).

Thus, there are perceived differences in the purpose and nature of university study in China compared to participants’ experiences in Western universities. University in China is seen as more regimented and teaching a one-way transmission of information. However, knowledge development resulting from engagement with course content may not be seen as the primary purpose of tertiary education. Instead, the status of having attended a good university may be the key criterion for employment competitiveness and social ‘sorting’.

The nature of (English) language

Chinese language is counted quantifiably in curriculum documents. Pupils in different years of schooling are expected to have mastered different quantities of Chinese characters, and it is an oft-quoted statistic in China that it takes a knowledge of about 2000 characters to read Chinese newspapers. In keeping with this quantitative view of language, the College English Curriculum, on which the CET exams are based and to which all universities including PSU adhere, includes a 156-page list of all the words and phrases a graduating student is expected to ‘know’, although the document is vague about what s/he might be expected to ‘know’ about them in terms of language in use (Chinese Ministry of Education 2007: 60–228). Language, including English, appears to be seen as a series of discrete items that can be measured and counted in curriculum documents, test preparation word lists, and in assessment. Implicit in this is a view of language in which ‘knowing’ a language means knowing its parts, that is, a view of language as words and structures rather than as discourse (texts) in contexts. This theory of language is different from that implicitly underpinning communicative language teaching (J. C. Richards and Rodgers 2001), and this section examines PSU students’ and teachers’ implicit and explicit theories of language.

My experience of teaching Chinese students at PSU and elsewhere is that they often have a good explicit knowledge about grammatical structures and can often translate the propositional meanings of many vocabulary items, but that there is often very little awareness of, for example, connotational meanings, context appropriateness, collocation, and dependent verb forms, and often very little communicative competence in using discrete, memorized language items. This is very similar to Guo’s (2008) description of school students’ English abilities.

Consequently, students may struggle to understand natural English because of insufficient macro-skills (i.e. listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills):


The Chinese English teacher, he will stress on the grammar, the words, and not the accent, the speaking, so we learn English just to prepare our test, not practising our oral exercising. So this is why we are eager to meet a foreign teacher because we want to learn some native speak, some native accent.

(Huang ‘PSU students’ focus group 12/06/2009)

Lili makes a similar assumption about language as a series of quantifiable items, describing her understanding of why her ten years’ study of English have ill equipped her to understand natural, spoken English:

If you just learn from [a] book or class you cannot understand the native speaker. English is changing quickly, for example the slang, you couldn’t understand the slang, and it is different from what you learn from book[s], so I think it is very important to study oral English. You need to learn from native speaker.

(Lili ‘PSU students’ focus group 12/06/2009)

To Huang and Lili, the problem seems to be a lack of language items, whether a ‘native accent’ or ‘slang’ words. While the barrier to comprehension may be accent or slang, a more persuasive explanation here might be the lack of skills development, in this case the listening macro-skill. Metaphorically, Huang and Lili assume that the jigsaw is missing vital pieces, rather than that they lack skill in putting together jigsaw puzzles. Language quantification creates a situation where instead of learning to use language, students learn and are tested on ever more obscure language items, creating a situation that is, in China, called ‘deaf and dumb English’ (Tsui 2007), where students may know a lot about English but cannot necessarily use it.

The perception of need for quantifiability on the part of Chinese curriculum planners may be assessment driven: if a key purpose of education is as a social filter then there is a logical need for an assessment system that can quantify and compare students’ abilities. In addition, a quantifiable view of language is better suited to explicit, transmission-style teaching, and the Chinese teachers’ lessons I observed at PSU featured complex teacher explanations of many language items, primarily vocabulary, in which teachers explained words’ multiple meanings using many de-contextualized examples.

The assumption of language as quantifiable also allows for a correct/incorrect binary to inform teaching. This may also be cultural, as ‘correct’, learnable answers would allow teachers to save face. As a result, Xiaoli complains:

English people don’t care too much about the words, don’t care the tense. Because you have to take written tests including the grammars and the words so you have to master the language from a second language teacher. … Native speakers, yes, they make mistakes, but it’s OK because I can understand them.



Xiaoli appears to be assuming a Chomskyan model of underlying linguistic competence and observable language performance, attributing the latter to native speakers’ use of language and the former to the language competence students may need to acquire in order to be successful at CET-type exams. In this model, language is a set of discrete variables that may be correct or incorrect; contextual differences are seemingly discounted in explaining language variance, including whether language is written or oral.

As Xiaoli demonstrates, students and teachers may value a right/wrong, quantifiable approach to language, not least as explicit language knowledge is necessary to pass CET-type exams. Many of the foreign teachers commented on their Chinese co-teachers’ superior declarative knowledge of grammar, contrasting this to Chinese teachers’ weaker procedural ability to use the language. Discussing implicit versus explicit knowledge, Claire says:

I think generally, when I’m writing stuff, I’ve got a real, you know, good grasp of grammar and I know what is grammatically correct on paper, but you ask me to explain that and I haven’t got a clue. … But they have Chinese teachers that are far, far superior in their grammatical knowledge and understanding about English than we are.


Larsen-Freeman (2003) calls Claire’s skill ‘grammaring’, meaning that Claire can use grammar. Claire contrasts her grammar knowledge to the students’:

I think generally … [the students] they’ve got this real strong grammatical knowledge and vocabulary. A kind of strong grasp of the working, the mechanics of the language, but [what they lack] it’s the understanding of what that’s actually saying though. Like yeah, ‘you’ve created this, but what is it actually saying?’ and a sort of interpretation of things, and, I think, a freedom to respond in the language.


Language quantifiability contrasts with the view of language assumed by communicative language teaching (CLT), the paradigm in which most of the participant teachers were trained and within which some had, themselves, learned languages. CLT regards language as an integrated meaning-making system rather than a series of discrete building blocks for classroom dissection (J. C. Richards and Rodgers 2001). Discussing error correction, Karen exposes her belief in the purpose of language as a system for communicating:

It’s usually, like, if they’re telling me about their weekend or something and they’ll say something and I’ll be like, ‘sorry? I didn’t understand that’. … And they might repeat it, and then they’ll write it down, and I’ll be like, ‘oh I see’, and say it, or rephrase it, and then they’ll repeat it. I mean if it’s only a small pronunciation thing and they haven’t got very much confidence


anyway then I won’t pick up on it. But, yeah, I would focus on where it’s causing a breakdown of communication.


In communicative language teaching, the objective is the acquisition of communicative competence, which includes the development of language macro-skills (Pham 2007). As discussed in Chapter 2, although the College English curriculum is ostensibly organized around skills development, examination backwash creates different pressures. As a result, the ‘reading’ lessons I observed at PSU, for example, featured texts on clickable PowerPoint presentations. The teacher explained the texts word-by-word, clicking through from each word or phrase to a different slide in which examples and Chinese and English definitions were given. Each paragraph took half an hour to ‘read’ in this way. This type of ‘skills’ teaching is entirely different from that assumed by CLT, in which reading sub-skills such as scanning and skimming are developed and ambiguities are tolerated in pursuit of holistic comprehension. Thus, although Chinese teachers may ‘teach reading’, the classroom practices that I observed in reading lessons at PSU were very different from ‘teaching reading’ in CLT, where the object is to engage with the text and extract overall gist and specific meaning. Listening lessons that I observed at PSU similarly focused on discrete language items rather than the development of listening skills. Additionally, as CET and its associated exam-preparation materials present listening tasks after students listen to the text, they may test memory as much as listening skills; this is a construct validity issue. These practices differ because they appear to be based on different theories of language.

The nature of language learning

The quantifiable view of language described above appears to translate to classrooms as an expectation that students will learn more lexical and grammatical items as they progress through the years of English language teaching in school and university, with testing at each stage comprising discrete item testing rather than testing of language proficiency and skills. This culminates, in the third year at PSU, in oral English as a capstone course designed to ‘activate’ language already learned ‘in theory’. I asked my PSU students for metaphors of how they understand the language learning process; Lynne Cameron (1999) describes metaphor as linguistic evidence that allows researchers access to mental representations. In this case, two metaphors are particularly vivid in understanding students’ conceptualizations of second language acquisition. The first is that language is ‘downloaded’ through years of learning English ‘in Chinese’ before being ‘installed’ through the oral English course. The second metaphor is that of Frankenstein: English is gradually and lifelessly built before being ‘sparked to life’ by oral English. These metaphors share the idea that English needs to be first learned, then used, not learned through use.


This may be explainable as a fear of error fossilization, as Ping explains:

You have to know some grammars … because [if] you doesn’t know any grammars and your English just poor, and you speak wrong English, [then, as a result] you speak like that again. And you form wrong ways, the wrong habit, not good habit, and after you have formed this habit you have, maybe you have to do a lot of things to rid of this habit. … First you have to learn from the book, then you use.

(Ping ‘PSU students’ focus group 12/06/2009)

Ping’s repeated use of ‘habit’ is evocative of behaviourism (Skinner 1957), in which language learning was believed to be the acquisition of language habits; this is the theory of learning behind methodologies such as audiolingualism (J. C. Richards and Rodgers 2001).

This implicit theory of learning may explain the concern of Hua, my PSU co-teacher, that students in my observed lesson were making mistakes and her perception that this was problematic and unintended. Hua explained that she regards students’ errors as evidence that learning has not succeeded, and that bad habits will ensue (Hua ‘interview’ 19/09/2007). Dan described a similar discord with his co-teacher, in which she made use of some of the communicative activities he had used, but used them only as controlled practice following a thorough explanation of the language items, so as to ‘prevent the students from making mistakes’. Dan described this situation as:

She seemed to think the activities … were some kind of break from learning … not that an activity can actually be the learning. … For her, the activity is the dispensable bit if she’s running out of time. For me, it’s the explaining bit that’s dispensable.


These very different views of classroom practice appear to indicate very different models of language acquisition as well as different cultures of learning. As discussed in Chapter 2, Chinese cultures of learning rely more on transmission of tangible learning products than constructivist, dialectic educational models. Xiaoli summarizes this position succinctly, ‘the teacher is teaching to the students, the students are receiving information from the teacher’ (Xiaoli ‘interview’ 18/10/2007). Although Beth notes that ‘content subjects’ are often taught via lectures in Western education, she describes languages at her university in the USA as taught in small tutorials focused on meaningful student output, and were:

More holistic, so you did get up some level of fluency. …[At PSU], students give back only the same output they‘ve received, so they don’t need to manipulate the language.



Consequently, having a tangible, transmittable ‘little sack of English’ (Dan ‘interview’ 18/09/2007) is valued. Commenting on his own interview transcript from 2008 (Phil’s earlier quote is in inverted commas), Phil explains:

‘Chinese education is answer-based’. Tangible answer based might be a better way, factual answer based, definitive. They do like that sort of idea that ‘I know that now, next page, I know that now’. … I’m almost certain it isn’t [the way a second language is learned] but we’re all children of the courses we’ve been on, the way we’ve learned.


The sequential learning of tangible facts contrasts with skills development inherent to communicative language teaching, which assumes that languages are learned through use and that mistakes are evidence of interlanguage development (J. C. Richards and Rodgers 2001). As a result, Zoe, one of the informants in this study and manager of language teaching programs at a multinational company, explains that she has dealt with complaints about Western teachers whose teaching is too ‘nebulous’ for Chinese students:

There’s pressure on teachers to make it explicit and measurable, to build in reviews. The students want to be tested, they want to have lists, and they want to count the number of things they’ve learned.

(Zoe ‘interview’ 07/09/2007)

This contrasts with the aim of oral skills development in which the objective is not the acquisition of new language items but instead the use of students’ existing store of language to develop macro skills including speaking and listening. The ‘Old China Hands’ focus group discussed this issue:

ZOE: Some Chinese students say they want ‘free-talk’. … Free-talk is you devise an activity that gives them a chance to organize themselves and talk about an issue or topic [i.e. meaningful learner output].

URSULA: And then they don’t have anything to say.GREG: But that’s the point, they don’t actually want it.ZOE: I don’t think they even know what free-talk is.NEIL: Their idea of free-talk is them asking you questions and you talk.GREG: Exactly.Val: They want to, kind of, sit there and listen to you, and you tell them a

story.(‘Old China Hands’ focus group 08/09/2007)

Thus, even though some students may be aware of the need to use English in order to develop oral fluency, they may subsequently be reluctant to speak.

Students’ reticence is explained by the foreign teachers as a student belief that making/hearing language mistakes may detract from their language level (Ryan,


Dan, Phil), the fact that students may be shy (Claire, Beth) and/or reluctant to show off (Mike), particularly as young Chinese women, who make up a majority in most PSU classes, may be ‘trained to be demure’ (Dan). In addition, Xiaoli explains her view of language acquisition:

In our minds, if you want to learn English, you have to listen to Westerners, native speaker[s], and your English level will be levelled up quickly. If you just with the Chinese people you will learn slowly. ... If you have a chance to listen to real, native people it will be better, you will be in the swimming pool with English, you get soaked, you get yourself soaked with all the things that you need.


According to this view, students can develop their English proficiency by listening to native speakers, without the need for learner output. This is again different from the implicit theory of learning of CLT in which learner output is understood to be as important as comprehensible input (Pham 2007).

The nature of oral English

As mentioned previously, Chinese universities divide English teaching into separate ‘content’ courses, with oral English taught separately, and in PSU’s case sequentially after, students learn English ‘in theory’ from their Chinese teachers. (In some universities oral English is taught concurrently with other English courses in the first two years of undergraduate study, before students undertake the CET4 examination.) However, because there is no compulsory oral English component in the CET exam, the timing of oral English is largely immaterial as it is the ‘content’ courses, and the Chinese teachers of English, that are perceived to be responsible for conveying the knowledge that students need to pass CET4 (and, therefore, to be eligible to graduate).

This means that by the time PSU students reach the foreign teachers’ oral English lessons in their third year most need only the university credits for attending and passing oral English. These credits are all but automatic, except in cases of the very weakest students, as Leo explains:

The school [PSU] has told us, ‘please don’t fail that many students, it doesn’t look good on anybody. …The school gives me a quota, like, ‘you can only fail 5%’. But if we pass everybody that’s good.


Thus, although oral English ostensibly serves to ‘activate’ students’ existing English, in practice it may seem like a trivial diversion to students from non-English disciplines, who can obtain the credits simply by attending and speaking a little English in the end-of-semester assessments conducted by the foreign teachers themselves.


Oral English may therefore feel redundant both to the students and to the teachers, and many of the teachers struggled to understand the nature and purpose of oral English. The foreign teachers’ jobs are never formally defined and there is some confusion as to their role, and indeed the purpose of the oral English course as a whole. Ryan and Beth explain:

There’s not really much structure, there’s not really many goals or aims that you’re going for, there’s not really any sort of thing that you’re working towards. … In Taiwan [where Ryan taught previously] everyone … starts off at a certain level and they go into a class with a bunch of people who are at that level. And you’re basically teaching from that class level to the next level. … Whereas this is just a bunch of students and a whole bunch of different levels, like, kind of, thrown into a class, and then they’re expected to produce English … we don’t actually teach them anything. It’s not like we start them at one point and try to bring them up to another point and they’re expected to have a certain level that we’ve given them, to pass the course. … They end off in the course the same level that they’ve started with.


Everybody seems to have a hard time getting a grasp on the point of the class and what the teachers are supposed to be putting in and then what the students are supposed to be taking away.


Ryan’s interpretation appears to be that as oral English is aimed at fluency development, which is a component of the speaking macro language skill, there is no ‘content’ addition that would bring students from one level of knowledge to another. Implicit in Ryan’s interpretation is a quantifiable view of language, as discussed above. This might be attributable to Ryan’s lack of any study of ELT/Applied Linguistics and/or to his own language learning background: Ryan is a high-level user of Chinese having studied in various language programs in Taiwan and Shanghai, and, as discussed above, Chinese language is widely understood as quantifiable.

Mike, who has also studied Chinese in China, is better able to identify listening and speaking macro skills development aims of oral English:

I don’t really want to teach them anything new, because they’ve been taught it hundreds of millions of times, they’ve got lists and lists of vocab that they have to go through and remember, and stuff. Basically I want to give them the opport-unity to speak and to use some of the stuff they’ve learned before. So effective, for me, being effective is to have them speak English and to have to use something they’ve learned rather than to walk out with this new grammar structure, or ‘I’ve learned this new word today’ … It’s like, I don’t want to teach, like, a new dance move, I just want them to get better at what they’re doing already.



Thus, Ryan and Mike have a similar interpretation of oral English although Mike has a clearer sense of its skills development purpose.

The question of the foreign teachers’ role was often discussed both at interviews and among the participants and other teachers at PSU, with no clear, agreed-upon job description emerging from the various discussions. Phil explains his understanding of the ambiguities of the teachers’ role:

[Oral English] teaching here seems to be taking place in its own self-contained box in which roles of foreign language teacher and learner are somehow both ill-defined and yet firmly-fixed. … I think the Chinese are astonishingly adept at making amorphous ambiguities (seem to?) mean something and nothing at the same time, and the longer I am here I find myself tuning in to what I think that means, or what the context allows it to mean … Perhaps I am saying that the teachers who can deal with that ambiguity can somehow develop and grow, or just exist, and teachers who simply need to know the precise shape and dimensions of the box, whether through personality or previous professional experience outside of China may struggle. … There is an idealized and/or unclear view of the role of the teacher by some (many/most?) and an ensuing struggle to cope with the true ambiguity and flexibility of language, teaching, culture, and people.

(Phil ‘e-mail’ 21/01/2009)

Phil commented further on his understanding of the ‘ill-defined and yet firmly-fixed’ role of the foreign teachers at PSU:

The longer I’ve been in China the more I’ve tuned into the amorphous way they ill define things, and that then gives them room for movement later on … if you don’t commit to something then you can change it, and you can both walk out the meeting later with … face saved because you can both say, ‘yeah, that’s what we wanted all along’. … But industrialized nations, that’s maybe not how they process things. … But how can you control the myriad factors of human interaction and things that happen? You can’t write so explicitly what [the job description] is. … The factors are so complicated that it’s almost impossible to hold to a definition.


Thus the intended purposes of both the foreign teachers’ role and the oral English course more generally are unclear, although this lack of clarity may be a technique through which the ambiguity and complexity of the situation might be handled. This issue, of the foreign teachers’ purpose at PSU is integral to later discussions, and it is revisited in Chapters 8 and 11.


Student output types

There is a lot of confusion among the participants about the balance of teacher input and student output, and the type of student output that might result in development of students’ speaking and listening skills. All the participants agreed with Mike’s principle: ‘if I’m talking, [the students] they’re not talking, and they’re here to talk … the most important thing is that they’re trying to speak’ (Mike ‘interview’ 13/09/2007). However, there are different understandings among the participants of the type of student output needed for oral fluency development. There is a continuum of possible student output types. Technically, students are ‘speaking’ if they are repeating after the teacher, and students often do this in traditional Chinese classrooms. A substitution drill or playing a word game produces another, very slightly freer type of student output, as students have a small amount of jurisdiction over language selection. Producing well-known set phrases is another distinct type of output, again with slightly more student control. Oral activities providing controlled or ‘freer’ practice of a specific language point can be quite ‘communicative’, but as students use pre-determined, perhaps pre-taught, lexical or grammatical structures, this is yet another distinct type of student talking. Finally, oral fluency activities allow students to use all their linguistic resources to communicate a message of their own choosing; this is the freest type of student language output.

There is a range of views among the participants about the extent to which language practice activities, and so, students’ output type, should be linguistically ‘controlled’, and the rationale for using controlled practice versus oral fluency activities also varies. At the oral fluency end of the above student output-type spectrum, Mike and Ryan are in the minority in their assertion that there should be no language input (i.e. no clarification and practice of lexis, grammar, functional exponents, etc.). Indeed, although Mike says he believes there should be no ‘new dance moves’, he did actually introduce new language in his lessons. Similarly, Ryan does not see his role as introducing or practising any specific target language, and his teaching included no clarification or controlled practice of the weekly grammar points.

Further along the continuum, Dan makes use of controlled practice activities, although his aim is fluency rather than accuracy of a specific language point:

For me, [a good activity comprises] a lot of English use. … I hear a lot of English use; I see a lot of energy and enthusiasm. They want to talk, and hopefully, if it fits into the framework [target language], I’m hearing some of the framework, though honestly, that doesn’t happen a heck of a lot. … The objective, for me, it’s to get them talking. … Every week you have a grammar point, it’s kind of a review, and hopefully we’ve set up the activity and tied it into the context where it would be easy for you to speak in this fashion [i.e. using the target structure].



For most of the foreign teachers the stated objective is to facilitate student output not to provide language input. However, in their observed lessons all except Ryan did introduce ‘new’ language points, although they did not insist on students using it, praising any and all student output whether or not this stretched the students linguistically and whether or not it bent or avoided the ‘rules’ they had introduced.

Claire sees her objective as a hybrid of oral fluency practice and adding to students’ language content knowledge, and this takes her further still along the continuum of controlled to freer output:

We’re working on oral themes, things to get them [the students] speaking, topics to get them talking about. So in that sense it’s then very hard to suddenly throw in a chunk of grammar and say, ‘you have to use this’, because it’s not necessarily natural to have to keep using that. You can guide them towards it, you can give sample sentences, you can keep saying things yourself, but unless you actually write it up on the board, ‘this is a gerund, blah blah’, I don’t think they’ll be necessarily even conscious of the fact that that’s the grammar point. … But I think it’s good to have something [a grammar point] in there to keep us focused. And I think it’s good for them in terms of going away and thinking, ‘I’ve learned something’.


Phil explains his understanding of why this approach works at PSU:

The culture here wants something tangible, a product, and the skills we’re developing are a process … I think you have to give the students something tangible as a lead in to them practising, and you probably have to slip in process [i.e. fluency development] without their knowing, so they’re not conscious of it being a process. … Sometimes you get it spot on and they really don’t know and it’s a really natural fluency exercise because they’ve just lost track [of the target language point], because you’ve set it up well enough.


In this excerpt, Phil alludes to what I term his ‘methodological sleight of hand’; this is discussed in more depth later in this chapter.

Similarly, Karen’s teaching is aimed at integrated language development, including adding lexical and grammatical content knowledge and developing students’ macro skills, including reading and writing. She explains:

I don’t like it personally, just teaching oral English. I find it really hard, and I do find it really tiring. … There is a lot of stuff that you can do with the book that’s writing, and reading, and grammar, and things, and I write down in my lesson plan that they’re going to do that and then I think, ‘oh wait a minute I shouldn’t really do that with them because that’s them sitting writing’. And if I ask them to write like three sentences that they’re going to


discuss I feel like … I’m wasting their time, they’re sitting there writing. But it is really difficult to plan purely speaking.


So there is plenty of confusion among the participants as to what type of student language output is desirable for the development of students’ oral English, and the extent to which the course should aim to build students’ language content knowledge.

Classroom activities

In the participants’ lessons that I observed at PSU I often saw activities where students produced language, and this output varied, along the above continuum, from controlled, discrete language items to cohesive oral discourse. However, the various types of output were usually justified in teachers’ subsequent interviews as ‘getting the students to talk’, and few teachers problematized the type of output students produced.

These activities included, for example, Ollie’s warmer:

Today I did an exercise where I call out the register and before I call out a student’s name I put on the board, uh, ‘polite Peter’. And I call out a student’s name and it might be Jennifer, and so I put up Jennifer’s name, so I’ve got polite Peter, and jolly Jennifer, and fantastic Fred. And I model the idea that these are adjectives, and the adjectives begin with the same letter as the person’s name. And then, so, they have to say an adjective that begins with that letter. … And some of the adjectives that the students were pulling out, without even looking in a dictionary were, what was one of them, ‘initiative’ [sic]. …It’s just the tip of the iceberg, just to get them talking.


Similarly, Mike described a word game he had used in class:

MIKE: It’s Mallet’s mallet. Basically, you split the class into two groups, have categories, animals, sports, cities, countries, things you can eat.

PHIONA: And what did you call it?MIKE: Mallet’s mallet. Do you remember Timmy Mallet? [A children’s TV

presenter in the UK in the 1980s] He did the same game. Basically you get two students up [to the ‘stage’ area at the front of the classroom] you pick a category, for example animals, and one person has to say an animal, ‘dog’, and the other person has to say a different animal, ‘cat’, and the person, they can’t say the same animal twice. And they can’t hesitate, they can’t say, ‘ah, uh, um’ and as soon as they say that they sit down and another student gets up.

PHIONA: What’s the mallet thing?MIKE: I don’t actually have a mallet.


PHIONA: But you could?MIKE: I could.PHIONA: And what would you–?MIKE: That’s how you say to sit down, hitting them on the head with this

toy mallet. But I don’t have that.PHIONA: What’s the rationale behind the–?MIKE: It just gets them talking in English, and thinking just, like, random

English words.(Mike ‘interview’ 13/09/2007)

In both these activities the student output is at single-word level, and students are not being challenged for complexity or to produce cohesive oral discourse. But in both cases the activities were justified as ‘getting the students to talk’.

These isolated-word contributions from students are in total contrast to some longer, freer, communication-focused, student contributions I observed in Ryan’s lessons, in which, for example, students discussed DVD piracy and copyright. Ryan explains the rationale behind the interaction in his lessons:

I’ll go into the class and I’ll bring up certain experiences that I have here, and of course they’ll tell me stuff … this job, it offers me the resources to actually learn more about [Chinese] culture. Now that’s a completely selfish thing, that really doesn’t have anything to do with the curriculum that we’re teaching or what Phil wants to see us do or anything like that. That’s just specifically what I want to get out of the class. … And for example, like, the festivals [lesson], and I was trying to explain about Halloween, and I asked them if they have any festivals, and you’d be surprised how many classes were like, ‘no, no festivals in China’. And then, you know, of course, because I know there’s festivals in China, and I’m like, ‘well what about spring festival?’ … But another teacher that doesn’t know about these things … could get really frustrated and annoyed with the class. It could take you down that path of ‘well, why don’t you speak? Why won’t you tell me?’ Right? Whereas I can sit back and be relaxed and be like, ‘well I know this, so I’m going to ask you specific questions about this’ and that gets them more into, like, actually talking to me. … I’ve basically made that effort to understand things from their cultural perspective, and I think they recognize that.


The most commonly-used type of classroom activity, falling between these extremes of Ollie and Mike’s word games, on the one hand, and Ryan’s discussions, on the other, is student ‘presentations’, which most of the participant teachers used extensively. Most presentations comprised students working in groups to prepare short role-plays around the lesson theme, often with the aim of including a target-language structure, then acting these out at the front of the classroom. As an example, one student presentation comprised the following language output; the students were asked to practise functional exponents for asking favours:


STUDENT 1: Hi, long time no see!STUDENT 2: Long time. You look more and more younger [laughter].STUDENT 3: Oh really, I’m so glad to hear that. STUDENT 1: Do you have some part-time job at your leisure time?STUDENT 3: Now there is way of filming. We have to sleep for ten hours, five

hours we have to go shopping, and another five hours we see the films, and the rest two hours we must go on film.

STUDENT 2: Oh what a pity, you know I’m now, now I’m agent of a very famous, famous, eh, famous film company, this time our company make a, would like to make a famous film. Would you please being, playing two roles in our film?

STUDENT 3: I’m afraid –STUDENT 2: – think about it, yes?STUDENT 1: Would you like to act it?STUDENT 3: I always play bad woman.STUDENT 2: This time the character are very suit you. STUDENT 3: Oh no, I hate thisSTUDENT 1: Then you think about.STUDENT 2: This is your style.STUDENT 1: I can always do this.STUDENT 3: I’m afraid I’m a little hungry now.STUDENT 1: I see. Would you like to eat something in KFC, or McDonalds?STUDENT 2: KFC? You know Western food is very awful.STUDENT 1: OK, maybe xiao long bao? [This is a famous Shanghai dish;

other students in the class laugh]STUDENT 2: OK, maybe we can make a deal on the table?STUDENT 1: Yes, we can talk on the, talk in details about the film?STUDENT 3: OK, let’s go to the restaurant.STUDENT 2: Come on.

(Mike ‘observed lesson’ 08/10/2007)

The students in this group did work a favour into their presentation, although this was a only small part of their total language output. So as a controlled practice activity of functional exponents for asking favours this activity was ineffective. However, this technique of providing an ostensible piece of target language and then praising students for using whatever language they can muster was a common strategy for achieving oral fluency skills development disguised as controlled practice.

Explaining the rationale behind student presentations in class, Leo says, ‘presentations are a very big part of our lessons … probably because presentations are one of the easiest activities to do’ (Leo ‘interview’ 13/09/2007). However, using a whole-class, plenary format, whether for word games, class discussions, or student presentations, makes for very little student talking time for each individual. Another problem with presentations was maintaining the attention of the rest of the students, many of whom either continued to work on their own group’s


presentation (sometimes loudly, always in Chinese) or paid no attention to other groups’ presentations. One solution the teachers found was to make the presentations funny either by taking part themselves or by feeding in funny situations or language at the preparation stage.

Another common issue with this activity type is that many of the presenting groups collaborated (in Chinese) during preparation time to write full scripts, which the presenters then read aloud. This changes the output-type of the activity. This issue, of reading aloud or memorizing texts that the presenters themselves did not understand was also a factor when teachers asked students to prepare presentations for homework, as Karen did. Mike hypothesized that reading aloud may be students’ understanding of what oral English is, comparing his own ‘oral Chinese’ class in which students mainly read Chinese characters aloud. Mike critiques this practice, saying: ‘I think when you’re generating stuff it’s a bit more useful than when you’re reading something off a piece of paper’ (Mike ‘interview’ 13/09/2007). Leo, however, sees value in students reading aloud, perhaps in building students’ confidence:

I think at first they [the students] will stand up and they will read something but at least they stood up and read something in front of the group. The next step maybe will be reading it from fewer words, from notes. The next step would be saying it without paper. The next step would be saying it naturally, without being nervous.


However, it is not clear whether this kind of gradual build up to oral fluency actually happens, not least as students may continue to depend on a written script throughout the 40 hours they spend in oral English classes. What a ‘performance’ stage might achieve is collaborative written fluency production, and given the large class sizes and dearth of opportunities for students to use English meaningfully and holistically this might well be a valuable opportunity for students to practise their English through written, fluency-based output. But it is not oral English.

Phil’s methodological sleight of hand

The teachers appear to be using whole-class activities because of the limitations on what is achievable in groups and closed pairs, as students resist speaking English unless they are asked to perform in front of the class with the teacher listening. This may be a question, for students, of the perhaps unclear purpose of practising with peer interlocutors, and/or it may be a question of students’ lack of motivation to participate unless the teacher actively polices them. Another issue may be students’ reluctance to make mistakes using language with which they may feel insecure if the teacher is not necessarily listening to their group/pair, and so would be unable to correct them. Fossilization was Ping’s concern. Students may also be reluctant to show off to their peers,


particularly if they perceive their own English to be better; Xiaoli offered this explanation of her own reluctance to speak in class as she is aware that her proficiency level is substantially above that of most of her peers; she attributes this to a part-time administration job working with Westerners and using English every day.

Phil explains his multi-layered solution to counter this problem. This is a methodological sleight of hand based on the PPP lesson structure, in which Phil disguises oral fluency development as controlled practice of a specific language point. Phil briefly presents a target structure and provides some controlled practice. He then sets up group/pair-speaking activities that occupy a majority of the class time and that tailor themselves to students’ levels. Phil’s model provides weaker students with controlled practice of the target language point while stronger students can use the activities as opportunities to develop oral fluency. There is face validity: Phil appears to be teaching something tangible so as to reassure students. The effectiveness of this approach was confirmed by classroom observation, from which it was clear that Phil is highly skilled at getting students to participate in closed pair/group activities in this way. This model was also the basis for the initial Wednesday planning meetings although the teachers’ treatment of the ‘language point’ at the meetings, and then in class, was increasingly cursory. This produced lessons like Ollie’s relative clauses lesson (described in Chapter 4) in which the language clarification was misleading, and lessons like Mike’s functions lesson, described next, in which students’ confusions were neither clarified nor corrected.

Mike introduced the following sentence beginnings:Please … ?Could you … ?Would you … ?I wonder if … ?Is it OK if … ?Do you mind … ?

However, he did not clarify the verb patterns that each takes; these are given in the textbook (J. C. Richards 1998: 15):

Please can I borrow your pencil?Could you please lend me a suit?Would you mind if I borrowed your video camera?Would you mind letting me borrow your laptop?I wonder if I could borrow $100.Is it OK if I use your phone?Do you mind if I use your CD player?

The italicized parts of the phrases, which appear in the textbook, are much more grammatically complex than the sentence beginnings on the board. As a result, students’ examples included the following:


Would you please being, playing two roles in our film?Would you mind if you lend me $10.Would you mind I borrow your book?I wonder if I having your money?Do you mind if you tell me the secret?

(Mike ‘observed lesson’ 08/10/2007)

As there was no clarification or correction, instead of being controlled practice of the structures this activity became output of students’ existing form errors as discrete-item utterances. Some of these utterances were subsequently embedded in oral fluency practice (in the group presentations) but much of this did not stretch the students linguistically as there was little push for complexity through task design. Mike and Ollie were also much less efficient than Phil, and their initial lesson stages were much longer and slower paced, leaving less time for the ‘main activity’ in which oral fluency might be developed. So although Mike and Ollie’s lessons were structured as PPP, as Phil’s were, they were less effective because the language presentation stage was misleading, or missing, and occupied a greater proportion of the lesson.

So while the PPP-like format worked well for Phil (an experienced teacher with good language awareness), the same formula did not easily lend itself to being used by less experienced teachers, whose presentation and controlled practice stages were compromised by their limited language awareness and difficulty in clarifying the language point in an engaging and effective way. But the free practice stage in which students used oral English did work well in many of the participants’ lessons, and this appears to be the purpose of Phil’s model lesson type.

Overcoming student resistance

Phil is also aware of what is less likely to be effective, and his choice of multi-layered activities that appear to be controlled practice addresses students’ desire for (perceived) tangible outcomes. This would explain students’ reluctance to participate in oral fluency-aimed activities done in small groups/pairs, in which there is no ‘correct’ structure and perhaps no ‘correct’ answer, particularly as the teacher cannot listen to all the students.

Ollie explained his use of one such activity from the textbook, in which students were to discuss and rank five jobs in order from most to least interesting (J. C. Richards 1998: 8):

I said to them, it’s, there’s no right answer; I even used the word subjective. … I think they understood. There’s no right answer, it’s subjective; mine is different from your list.


Ollie complains that students did not respond well to his ‘subjective’ activity and that they spoke in Chinese throughout. Phil explains students’ resistance to oral fluency, critiquing Ollie’s activity:


[It is] too aim-free and nebulous for a Chinese classroom. They need to see the point of the activity and I don’t think they’d grasp the point of an activity like that. It would maybe be OK if you did it as a later activity, after some language input, but not initially.


Phil’s perception of the need to disguise oral fluency development as controlled practice is borne of this problem, of skills development being perceived as too ‘nebulous’ as students expect tangible, quantifiable learning outcomes. One origin of students’ resistance may therefore be a perception that they have already covered the language point in question. Phil and Ryan explain this perception:

[The teachers] turn the students off because they think they know it, they feel like they’ve already ticked that box, they’ve closed that page in the book … they haven’t necessarily internalized it but they’ve seen it, so they perceive they’ve learned it.


[The students] look at the book and see ‘maybe you could plus verb’, and they think ‘I know those words, that’s not new, I already know that’, and even though there’s no possible way that person would ever use that in a conversation they’ll dismiss it and go, ‘boring’, [and put their] head down on the desk. And then you ask them, like, ‘what would you say: you just killed a friend and you don’t know what to do with the body?’ And they’ll be like, ‘uhhh, I say go to police’. … So they’re not using it at all. You’ve just taught it, you’ve just reviewed it … and you know that person’s just completely tuned out … they don’t get it, like, you’re supposed to be practising it. We’re not teaching you anything new. That’s what I tell them at the beginning: we’re not teaching them anything new.


This may also contribute to the problem, described in Chapter 7, of teachers ‘dumbing down’ the lessons. By having students develop oral fluency without adding ‘content’, students may perceive that the teachers are pitching the level of the material too low. Teachers, like Beth, who focus on classroom affect may reinforce this perception that oral English learning outcomes are intangible and/or below students’ language level:

I try to make students forget directly that it is a class, to make them feel relaxed so they can produce English naturally, so they’ll try things out. I say, ‘get by on whatever you think you can’. … I tell students ‘you already know all of this stuff, basically’. My aim is to get them to use it.



Beth is trying to help students overcome their shyness in using English, a shyness perhaps reinforced by years of accuracy-focused discrete-item English teaching and testing. However it is likely insufficient to simply tell students not to worry about mistakes, as this is ‘fighting the culture’ (Phil ‘interview’ 05/10/2007). Instead, students may feel more resistance if they not only do not understand the rationale of such seemingly-intangible teaching but are also being asked to do something that may cause them to ‘lose face and feel uncomfortable, like making mistakes’ (Mike ‘interview’ 10/10/2007).

Student resistance is expressed in various ways, including doing something else, such as sleeping, reading newspapers, sending and receiving text messages, listening to MP3 players, or speaking off-topic in Chinese to their classmates. The problem of students chatting during pair and group work activities was common in the lessons I observed and taught. Claire says:

You can’t really police it. I could stand there going ‘you can only speak to each other in English’, but for all I know until I’m standing right next to them they might not be. I think what’s important is that even if they discuss it in Chinese they’ve still got to think about how they’re going to tell me in English.


However, Claire’s solution entails a change to the aim of the activity, with students collaborating to create a product to show to the teacher rather than developing their skills though the process of discussing with peers. Several other teachers concurred that ‘pure’ oral fluency activities, such as Ollie’s ‘subjective’ activity, are difficult to achieve. Solutions included legitimizing oral fluency work by disguising it as controlled practice or having students present to the class after a period of preparation.

Mike and Xiaoli explain reasons for students’ resistance to such activities:

[The students] they want to speak to the teacher. A lot of the time they don’t see the point of, like, ‘me talking to ten of my friends’; they don’t see it as learning anything.


You have to practise with someone better. Otherwise I’m teaching him [my peer] not I’m learning from him.


Dan agrees that the students may struggle to ‘read’ the rationale of a small group-based free-speaking activity: ‘why they’re doing it is probably beyond the students at this point’ (Dan ‘interview’ 11/09/2007).

The problem, then, may be that teachers are not making their rationale clear enough to students. The ‘Old China Hands’ focus group discussed this issue:


URSULA: [CELTA-type] Cert teaching is a production. It should flow seamlessly. But for some adult students, they think, ‘I didn’t learn anything in that lesson’.

ZOE: The new teachers feel that they have to keep it a secret, like it’s part of the trick or the surprise for the students is that they don’t know what’s going to happen. If I would tell them beforehand then maybe that takes some of the fun or the mystique out of it.

(‘Old China Hands’ focus group 08/09/2007)

Tsui (2007: 670) confirms that Chinese students may find the apparent aimlessness of CLT frustrating; she describes students as ‘left groping in the dark’ when the explicit linguistic objectives of activities are not made clear. However, Leo endorses the position of teachers keeping aims to themselves:

I think the learning aim should be subliminal. If you tell the students, ‘this is what we’re going to learn, and this is the activity we’re going to do to learn that aim’, that already killed the activity.


The issue of the extent to which lesson and activity aims should be made clear to students is salient because, as discussed, CELTA-type training confers a teaching ‘toolkit’ of teaching behaviours without solid theoretical underpinnings. As a result, the foreign teachers themselves often struggled to identify the aims of their classroom activities. This resulted in some using activities with little discernable purpose, including low-level vocabulary games like Mallet’s Mallet.

Additionally, the participant teachers are inadequately prepared and insufficiently supported by reference resources and academic managers to be effective in clarifying the sometimes-complex language points in New Interchange 3 (e.g. relative pronouns, adverbial clauses, gerunds, mixed conditionals, indirect statements; these are points from units 1–3 only). Leo says, of the participant teachers’ grammar knowledge:

If tomorrow they [the university] opened a grammar course, and they asked our teachers to teach grammar, half of the teachers would quit, and the other half would get fired, because they don’t know how to teach grammar.


This corresponds with participants’ own lack of confidence in teaching grammar, as discussed in Chapter 5. In addition, the amount and type of professional support for these beginning teachers is wholly insufficient. CELTA-type courses assume ELT-qualified academic managers will support teachers, and that they will have access to resources to enable them to develop their skills.

However, there are few resources at PSU:


We have no grammar books or dictionaries [for the oral English teachers] … we decided we didn’t want anything because we don’t want to spend too much money on photocopying. It’s cost cutting.


In addition to the absence of any developmental resources, Leo, the Director of Studies, is less well qualified than some of the teachers as he does not have a CELTA/equivalent ELT certificate. And although Phil does have a Trinity diploma in TESOL and a degree in Education, he is not in daily contact with the teachers and only completed the diploma in late 2008. In these circumstances it is perhaps unsurprising that the Wednesday lesson planning sessions treat the language point superficially and that the participants’ treatment of language in class is often of dubious effectiveness.

Thus, oral English is limited on two sides: students may resist oral-fluency activities as insufficiently tangible and teachers struggle to be effective in language clarification. This results in lessons where a language point is mentioned but insufficiently clarified and where students subsequently engage in practice activities in which they use whatever linguistic resources they can muster, and are neither penalized for not using the target structure nor corrected when they make target-language mistakes. Chapter 10 revisits this issue, discussing the extent to which this teaching might be considered ‘effective’.

Changing practices in oral English

I have discussed some factors that influence oral English teaching as it is conducted at PSU, and the resulting variety in the day-to-day practices of the teachers. These can be conceptualized along a dual-axis model, shown in Figure 6.1. This graph shows a variety of different practices undertaken by different teachers, and their positioning relative to one another.

Phil’s lesson was perhaps the most ‘communicative’ of those I observed, and it offered the most student talking time (primarily in pairs) and a significant level of meaningful output, albeit disguised as controlled form-focused practice. His lesson was similar to those of Claire and Dan, although their lessons made slightly more use of teacher-centred stages and provided more, and more overt, form-focus on discrete language items. However these three teachers’ lessons fall into the top right quadrant, which is where I conceptualize effective speaking skills (oral fluency) development lessons. My own teaching can also be located in part in this quadrant. However, teaching at PSU made my lessons both more teacher centred and more form-focused; as oral fluency development, my own teaching became less effective at PSU.

Karen, Leo, Mike, and Steph, as well as Beth’s earlier teaching (in 2007) can be grouped into the top left quadrant; Steph is a PSU teacher that I interviewed in 2008 and whose experience is discussed in Chapter 7. These teachers’ lessons were student centred in that a large proportion of their lessons was spent on group work, pair work, and student presentations in front of the class, although


these teachers spent more time than Dan, Phil, and Claire pre-teaching target language and participated more in students’ presentations than Phil, Dan, and Claire. But all the lessons above the x-axis were student centred in that the balance of classroom interaction was student – rather than teacher-talking time, with much of this accomplished in pair work and/or small groups.

Ryan’s earlier teaching, my own later teaching, and Ollie’s classroom practice all fall into the bottom left quadrant, in which lessons were form focused and in which the teacher spoke more than the students. This is also the quadrant into which Hua, my Chinese co-teacher’s, lessons can be conceptualized, (although as I observed Hua teaching intensive reading and listening rather than oral English, it is unfair to evaluate her lessons against the same productive skills criteria). However, Hua’s lessons may be indicative of students’ expectations about language teaching more generally.

Stu

den

t-ce

ntre

din

tera

ctio

nTe

ache

r-ce

ntre

din

tera

ctio

nPhiona(earlylessons)

PhilKaren

DanSteph Claire

LeoMike

Beth(12/10/07)

Form focus(controlled practice ofdiscrete language items)

Meaningful output(fluency practice ofholistic discourse)

Phiona(laterlessons)

Ryan(14/09/07)

Ollie Beth(09/06/09)

(Hua)

Ryan(28/05/08)

Figure 6.1 Teachers’ practices categorized by classroom interaction and student language output types


Finally, the bottom right quadrant is the conceptual space into which Beth and Ryan’s later teaching moved, as they both adapted their teaching as they gained experience at PSU. This shift, towards a teacher-centred interaction pattern but away from form-focused language practice is indicative of the move that both Ryan and Beth made towards discussing ‘culture’ rather than focusing on English language. As these discussions were conducted primarily in English, these lessons can be conceived as oral fluency development. This is the ‘strong’ communicative approach described in Chapter 2 (Pham 2007). Beth and Ryan’s shift away from language-focused English teaching is discussed in Chapter 8.

Conclusion

What is clear from Figure 6.1 and from the discussion in this chapter, is that there is little certainty among teachers as to what oral English is and how oral English lessons might best be conducted. This is exacerbated by the absence of a clear job description. Teachers’ and students’ different conceptualizations of the purpose of education, the nature of language, and the nature of language learning also contribute to the different versions of oral English teaching undertaken at PSU. Another factor affecting teachers’ practice is their perception of the contextual constraints including the different levels and types of pressures they perceive from their students. The most prevalent type of pressure teachers experienced was the pressure to be ‘fun’. And this is the topic of the next chapter.

7 The pressure to be ‘fun’

In some ways, this is the most important chapter in this book. In it, I describe the single largest constraint the participants perceive on their work, the pressure to be ‘fun’. This pressure contributes to the marking of the conceptual boundary to the foreign teachers’ role at PSU, discussed in Chapter 8, and is important in determining what it means to be effective, or at least successful, as a foreign teacher; this is explored in Chapter 10. This chapter’s data is also important evidence in the discussion, in Chapter 11, of identity constructions borne of teaching at PSU. It is my contention that the pressure to be ‘fun’ arises primarily from Occidentalist constructions of foreigners; these were discussed in Chapter 3 and are revisited from the participants’ points of view in this chapter.

What, though, does it mean to be ‘fun’? I examine the construct inductively from classroom and interview data. ‘Fun’ is a dualistic construct, comprising the notion of teachers being funny but also of teachers organizing activities in which the students might have fun. This duality may be linguistic, with the students perhaps conflating the ideas of fun and funny. Whatever the origin, the students’ expectations affect teachers’ work and their morale as teachers, and the effects are explored in this chapter. The pressure to be ‘fun’ also has a negative impact on teachers’ professional development.

PSU teachers experience the pressure to be ‘fun’ in two ways: top-down from management and bottom-up from students. These are inter-related. Students put pressure on teachers to be fun through their responsiveness or unresponsiveness in class and through their end-of-semester teacher evaluations. This student feedback is the primary tool used by management to judge foreign teachers, and there is pressure on teachers to undertake teaching that is popular with students whether or not this could be considered effective. Again, though, the unclear purpose of oral English teaching is salient: if the foreign teacher role is unclear, how else might their effectiveness be evaluated except in terms of students’ enjoyment?

Students’ preferences are seemingly derived from binary discourses about culturally Other, perhaps hedonistic and ‘Hollywood-like’, foreigners; this was discussed in Chapter 3. These constructions contribute to the fun/not-fun binary against which foreign teachers are evaluated at PSU: Leo compares oral English lessons to American sitcoms, which are ubiquitous on DVD in China, saying that


for students lessons with a foreign teacher seem (or should seem) ‘as if they’re watching Friends and one of the characters pops out of the TV and they get to talk to them’ (Leo’interview’ 03/09/2007). This chapter considers the impact that this has on oral English teaching, and on oral English teachers, at PSU.

The nature of ‘fun’ in oral English classes

As mentioned above, ‘fun’ teaching is often conflated with the idea of teachers being ‘funny’ and there are two main types of ‘fun’ teaching. Firstly, teachers may entertain the students with teacher-led ‘shows’, including telling funny stories, pulling faces, and clowning. Secondly, teachers may organize ‘fun’ activities for the students to do, such as games and competitions. These are often teacher-fronted and this may allow for a hybrid of these two types of ‘fun’. For example, students may do front-of-class presentations with the teacher adding ‘fun’ by participating, and/or by conceiving the activity so as to ensure the presentations are entertaining; for example, Mike recommends ‘get[ting] them to act out love stories; they’re always fun’ (‘teachers’ meeting’ 12/09/2007).

All the participant teachers were deliberately fun/funny in the delivery of their lessons, including using funny anecdotes (Karen, Phil), pulling faces (Claire, Dan, Ryan), using funny voices (Leo, Dan, Mike), gently making fun of students (Leo, Mike, Claire, Ryan), and choosing funny examples to illustrate language (Mike, Beth, Karen, Claire, Dan, Ollie). As an example, Karen adapted a vocabulary matching exercise into an activity where students in groups acted out the meanings of words. Karen demonstrated the activity by explaining the word ‘coincidence’ using the following story:

Yesterday I went to the park. … I went to Guilin Park, you know it? [Students murmur in recognition] … So I heard [imitates cat] ‘miaow, miaow, miaow’ [students laugh]. And I was thinking, ‘ah, cat’. So I was going [crouches down, rubs fingertips together as if to attract a cat] ‘miaow, miaow miaow, miaow’, like that, trying to get the cat [gestures towards her]. I could hear [cups ear] ‘miaow miaow miaow’ back, so I started louder: ‘[I said] miaow, [I heard in reply] miaow, [I said] miaow, [I heard] miaow’. [Students laugh] Closer, closer, closer. Miaow miaow miaow. Looked up [Karen looks up from her crouching position]. Ah. [Stands up] There was a very handsome man there [students laugh] and I’m going ‘miaow miaow miaow‘, trying to get the cat. I love cats, he loves cats. We were trying to get a cat and, boom [claps her hands] we met. I like him, he likes me. Coincidence [Karen points to the word on the chalkboard; students laugh].

(Karen ‘observed lesson’ 11/10/2007)

While Karen’s story does not adequately illustrate the meaning of the word ‘coincidence’, it got the students’ attention through ‘fun’. Claire explains how laughter can be utilized in class:

The pressure to be ‘fun’ 127

I think the Chinese students have got quite a nice, innocent sense of humour that you can bring into the classroom, and you know, even, sort of, facial expressions and the way you react to what a student says can cause a lot of laughter that you wouldn’t necessarily get with, like, British students, and that is really nice and you can use it in the class to get, you know, to improve the environment.


In addition, most participants conceive being ‘funny’ in oral English teaching as the opposite of being serious. Yasper, a very experienced Belgian teacher working in ELT management contrasts his previous teaching experience with oral English teaching at a Chinese medical university:

I really had to tone down my topics, coming from high schools in Belgium … I had to all of a sudden go down to talking about fashion, and pets, and stuff, because in the beginning I would discuss things like stereotypes, but it just didn’t go down very well, so I had to lighten it up. And I think I was a bit of a nice change from their regular teachers … In general you have to keep it fairly light. They don’t feel comfortable about it if you touch upon a heavy subject in the class; the atmosphere will become really heavy. … In Belgium, of course, you tried to make your classes interesting, but not for the sake of making it interesting. And all of a sudden here the challenge really is to make it quite light, funny, make sure the students have a good time.

(Yasper ‘interview’ 06/09/2007)

The second type of being fun is through the setting up of teacher-led games for students to play. As an example, ‘Typhoon’, was demonstrated at a teachers’ meeting as follows:

Harry [the senior teacher in 2007] drew a 16-square grid on the board and explained that he had a similar, hidden, grid. On the teacher’s grid are the points that can be won for answering the questions associated with each square correctly. Also on the teacher’s grid are the ‘chance’ symbols in some squares, at random. The ‘chance’ symbols are: ‘a gun to shoot the opposing team’s best player’; an arrow, which means that ‘the two teams swap scores’; a star, meaning the team can re-instate a player who has been ‘shot’ out; and a ‘typhoon’ which removes both groups’ points. The game is played as a quiz, with two teams answering questions and choosing squares to determine their score for each. Harry explained ‘you can use this to test the kids’ [sic] knowledge of a text you’ve given them for homework’. He added ‘if you want to make it last longer you could have a head-to-head of two students at the front’ [representing their teams].

(Phiona ‘field notes’ 31/08/2007)


To me, there is little discernable aim to this game except to test students’ recall of a text read for homework through teacher-fronted display questions. Any oral English produced by students during this game would be isolated words in answer to teacher questions as students would presumably discuss the answers in Chinese among their group; this was confirmed in observed lessons. However, I observed various similar games, and commonalities among these games were teacher fronting, students competing against each other in teams, and usually a tenuous aim to the activity. This is not to say that games per se are not useful in class; they can be. It is perfectly possible to combine a game with coherent lesson aims. The issue is when either the game has no clear aims, or, as discussed below, when the aims are not clear to the students (or, indeed, to the teacher).

The hybrid type of classroom ‘fun’ is when teachers add ‘fun’ to students’ activities through their own involvement. This is illustrated by a segment from a student presentation from one of Leo’s lessons, in which two students are introducing their partners to the class. The two students and Leo are on the ‘stage’ at the front of the classroom:

STUDENT 1: She’s afraid of dogLEO: She’s afraid of dog? Ah.STUDENT 1: She cannot swim.LEO: [nodding, smiling] Yes.STUDENT 1: Her favourite food is cheesecake.LEO [TO THE CLASS]: Shhh.LEO [TO THE PRESENTERS]: Aahh, very good.STUDENT 1: In the future she want to go to the Australia.LEO: [nodding] Did you ask her why?STUDENT 1: NoLEO AND STUDENT 1 [TO STUDENT 2]: Why?Some of the class, and Student 1 and Student 2, laugh.STUDENT 2: I think it’s a beautiful – LEO: It is beautiful?STUDENT 2: And very large [gestures that it is large]. Yes.LEO: Mmm.STUDENT 1: She said will she have a lot of money, money, she want to go,

she want to travel around the world. LEO: OK. Now I have one question. If you have a lot of money and you

travel around the world, are you going to take him? [gestures to a male student, student 2’s friend, at the back of the room].

STUDENT 2: [laughing] Erm …LEO: She’s thinking about it.[All students laugh; Student 2 has her hand over her mouth, and is doubled

over laughing.] LEO: [laughing] That’s all I need to know, you don’t have to answer. That’s

all I need to know. All right. Can you [student 2] introduce Student 1


for us? It’s OK, it’s OK, you don’t have to take him [laughter from the whole class].

(Leo ‘observed lesson’ 12/09/2007)

‘Fun’ in oral English lessons is therefore achieved either by the teacher performing, or by the use of ‘fun’ activities, or by a hybrid of the two, such as teachers’ involvement in student presentations so as to make them more fun.

Effects of ‘fun’ on teachers’ work

The pressure teachers perceive to be ‘fun’ impacts on their lesson planning and teaching practices. Mike explains the impact on his rationale for selecting classroom activities:

PHIONA: When you say something works or doesn’t work, how do you define that?

MIKE: Well, if it works then they do it, and they’re happy doing it, if it doesn’t work they sit in silence, looking at each other, rolling their eyes.


Dan makes a similar point:

You’ve got to make it interesting. And I know a lot of teachers here relied on a lot of games last year. I did, sometimes I did, but I’d get a little smug, and I’m like, ‘I’m not someone who just plays games all the time’ but if you do that too much you’ll have 14 classes a week that are looking at you thinking ‘I want to be in a class that plays games, you stink’. So you play games.


The pressure to entertain has an adverse effect on teachers’ lesson planning, as activities are selected because of their potential to entertain rather than their utility in addressing students’ needs. This relates to the unclear purpose of oral English, discussed above, as student enjoyment is more easily measured than progress towards intangible curriculum objectives.

There may also be an effect on teachers’ perceived classroom roles. Karen discusses possible PSU student criteria for evaluating teaching and the effect these have on her teaching:

I think here it’s more about keeping their attention … thinking of things that are going to keep them entertained but are going to keep them talking at the same time. … I feel I’m kind of doing more, like I’m tireder working here [compared to my previous teaching job in the UK], I feel a bit more like a ‘wooo, look at me’ [attracting students’ attention].



Thus, the backwash from the pressure to be ‘fun’ may cause teachers to teach and behave differently than they otherwise might, perhaps entertaining or performing more for the PSU students. Phil addresses this, saying:

I think there’s a real confusion for a lot of the teachers between ‘engaging’ and ‘fun’. They’re not presently distinguishing between the two of them particularly clearly.


However, Leo does not provide much support to teachers in helping them do so. In fact, he encourages them to be entertaining to distinguish themselves from the Chinese teachers:

LEO: If the Chinese teachers [of English] were entertaining, taught in the same style as we did … we wouldn’t exist, there would be no need for us to be there. We provide something different. It’s like, supply and demand. They want something different; we provide it to them. If everyone here was teaching, sort of, like, a lecture-style we would lose our contracts next year because that’s not what the school wants. We only provide them with what they want.

PHIONA: That puts us, the foreign teachers, into a kind of a box, where we can do the fun stuff but that’s all we can do?

LEO: I think that’s true. … A lot of [what the foreign teachers do] it’s babysitting.


There is also an impact on teachers’ effectiveness, and Beth describes the issue of teachers ‘taking something out’ in order to ‘add fun’:

Steph [an experienced British teacher] came in … with ‘I’m a teacher, I’m going to go in and teach’… and they absolutely hated her at first because she wasn’t fun. They had to practise the grammar, and they hated her. … And she kept running into these barriers of the students not doing anything, they didn’t want to talk. She had to force them to do everything. They would ignore her, they’d speak Chinese… and then she tried to combat it, she changed some of her teaching style and the students started to like her. But then she became not as effective and she became less invested. She didn’t care as much as this semester’s gone on. So by now, by the end of the semester she doesn’t care as much anymore, because she feels like she couldn’t be effective with her teacher training, and she’s done real teaching before where she actually does grammar and she does, she has a whole, set curriculum, and here she just felt like she couldn’t do it because the students wouldn’t respond to it, she had to be fun. … She’s had to lose something to replace it with being fun.



An example of this phenomenon of replacing effective teaching with ‘fun’ occurred in one of Beth’s lessons, the aim of which (from the textbook) was to revise and practice functional exponents for asking favours. Beth explained later that her rationale was to make the content ‘more fun’ and so she introduced the following ‘creative favours’: ‘could you please push me off this building? Could I eat your pet? Would it be OK if I stole all your money?’ After writing this last ‘favour’ on the board, Beth explained to the students:

A very polite robber might ask this. [He might] come up with a gun and say, ‘excuse me, would you mind if I stole all your money?’ It’s a very nice way to ask to rob from you.

(Beth ‘observed lesson’ 12/10/2007)

Beth then asked the students to think of their own ‘creative favours’, and praised a student who produced ‘I’m very angry, would you mind if I beat you?’ At issue is the function of the target exponents; by distorting the example situations the functionally situated meanings of the exponents become inaccurate. This is caused by the pressure for lessons to be ‘fun’.

Effects of ‘fun’ on teachers’ morale

The pressure to make lessons fun above all also raised questions among the teachers as to their purpose at PSU:

I’ve noticed that a lot of the teachers, the people who started when I started [August 2007], that a lot of people have become very, sort of, demoralized with the job. And I think some people more than others have found it hard to even enjoy the job day to day. … I think you’ve probably got to lower your expectations of this job.


Dan was like, ‘I am not a clown; I’m not going to be affected by this’. But then he was the one that got affected the most because when he challenged his students, he made demands, tried to teach them something, they gave him the hardest time: not answering, not getting into groups, speaking Chinese. I remember one day, I was teaching beside him and he stormed out ten minutes before the end of class looking like he was going to kill someone, so I ended my class and went to him and he’s like, ‘I can’t take this any more’, because he was trying to teach the students something and trying to get the students to respond … He got so frustrated. So the problem would be, even if you had all teachers like Dan, after four weeks they [the students] would come into the [department] office and be like, ‘our teacher isn’t fun’.



Dan explains his own experience at PSU and the effect it has had on his morale as a teacher:

Sometimes I’ve almost started crying because I’m just so frustrated. … I take it really personally. I could rock up each day and teach a funny class, but I would be hating myself. … This semester I was like, ‘jeez, I can’t hold it together, do I really want to do this for the rest of my life?’ … There’s no real deep talking about language or lessons in the office. We’re repeating things [lessons and activities] over and over, and there’s no real development … I feel myself slipping more and more towards that ‘A to Z’, ‘killer’ [these are the shorthand names for two commonly used activity types. In A to Z students in small groups generate alphabetical vocabulary lists around a topic, for example animals (alligator, butterfly, cat, dog, elephant, etc.). ‘Killer’ is a police officer/suspect role play.] … it’s getting more and more reductive and we’re kind of trapped by it but we’re also reinforcing it. … I came up with so many lessons [when I was teaching in Thailand and Cambodia] … and now I get back here and my brain shuts off, it goes dead. And underlying all of it is ‘well, you know, it doesn’t matter anyway; the students don’t care what we do’.


Even Ryan, who claims not to care about teaching and to be motivated only by the desire to live in China, explained the effect that the demand for ‘fun’ teaching above all else has had on his professional morale:

I’ve almost been pushed into a situation where they’ve told me I don’t care. … [So] I have to take that ‘yeah, man, I don’t care’, because … if you care you’re vulnerable. So you have to at least look like you don’t care. … [But] I care about the students, I care about coming to work and feeling like I’ve done a satisfactory job and I think one of the things here is that I’ve never felt like I’ve come to work and done a very satisfactory job.


Thus, the entertainment role in which the participant teachers find themselves at PSU affects both their practice and their morale.

While it is possible to combine engaging content with aims-driven teaching and clear language/skills learning outcomes, it may not be possible for these teachers in this context. It appears that the teachers feel ill equipped to adapt their teaching in a principled way to the demands they face at PSU. As a result, their morale suffers as they struggle to deliver both what students want and what they have been trained to do. The ‘toolkit’ training paradigm of CELTA-like courses teaches a skills set without much underlying rationale and emphasizes the need for post-course support by qualified academic managers (Ferguson and Donno 2003; Green 2005; Horne 2003; Kanowski 2004; Senior 2006). But Leo is actually less well ELT qualified than some of the teachers and there is no day-to-day contact with Phil. It also appears that Phil’s efforts at teacher development are


aimed too far above teachers’ developmental level, a topic considered in more depth in Chapter 10.

One particular problem that causes teachers’ low morale is the difficulty they have in pitching the lessons at students’ level. This is in part caused by mixed level classes and in part caused by the inert knowledge problem, where students have a large passive knowledge that oral English is supposed to ‘activate’, as described in Chapter 6. Claire explains the problem:

It’s so hard to get them to talk. You know when you sort of say, ‘what did anyone think? Can anyone tell me what this means?’ And, you know, you’ll have people sitting there looking away. … There’s silence and they’re waiting to be chosen to speak, they’re waiting for the teacher to choose a name and say, ‘you, specifically, tell me’ ... And you can often see, when you stand up the front, I see them whisper it to each other … But then I think maybe it’s not like that, it could be that maybe I’m speaking too quickly or maybe they don’t understand the question. So I try to make it easier and I ask again.


Teachers may erroneously interpret students’ silence as incomprehension, and this may cause the teachers to pitch their language grading too low. Students’ unresponsiveness may also cause the teachers to lower their expectations of students’ contributions and to praise any and all responses, leading to students’ output not being pushed for complexity. One example of this was in Leo’s lesson, where he gave students partial sentences as cues for them to ask each other questions, rationalizing this as seeking ‘to minimize the dead time and the Chinese they’re using’ (Leo ‘interview’ 13/09/2007). These cues were: What is your…? How old are…? How many…? Do you like…? What is your favourite…? Do you have…? (Leo ‘observed lesson’ 12/09/2007) The expected output from students is very low level considering most of the students had been learning English for 8–10 years. This is conceptualized as a cycle, shown in Figure 7.1.

students may think foreign teachers are

idiots and/or that oral English is a

waste of time

students are unresponsive

in class

teacher thinks they are

pitching the level too high

teacher oversimplifies

the content

Figure 7.1 The ‘dumbing it down’ cycle


However, the issue may not be the teachers’ lack of skills, qualifications, or post-course development, or this may not be the entire explanation. In the next section I discuss my own teaching at PSU and my handling of the pressure to be ‘fun’. Without wishing to seem vainglorious, I am a well-qualified teacher and I have been working in ELT since 1993, in seven countries including China. And I, too, found oral English teaching to be difficult and exhausting at PSU due to the pressure to entertain mostly unmotivated students with teacher-fronted ‘shows’.

My own teaching at PSU

I taught at PSU as part of my participant research there and I also encountered pressure from PSU students to be ‘fun’. The students’ unresponsiveness to much of what I consider to be effective teaching meant that my teaching became more ‘performance-like’. I told funny stories, talked about light topics (such as the kitten that Claire and I had found), and the students responded better to this than to any planned content. I felt like less of a teacher and more of a foreign curiosity at PSU. I did not particularly enjoy teaching there, although there were a few motivated students who were a delight. But much of the time I felt I was the only person in the classroom who cared about the students’ learning.

This experience stands in stark contrast to my previous teaching experience elsewhere, including Polish and Peruvian (compulsory) high school English classes and Qatari office ladies’ (compulsory) English classes, where many students were equally indifferent to English. I found all these groups more motivated and responsive than the PSU students. Teaching at PSU also contrasts with my previous experience teaching Chinese students in Australia and on teacher education courses in Australia and China, including teaching at Fudan University on University of Sydney MEd TESOL courses. However, unlike the PSU students there may be a stronger perception of need for English in Australia. And my teaching at Fudan and on other teacher education courses differs from PSU as it was more tangible, content-subject teaching and the students had chosen to be there so could reasonably be expected to be motivated to learn. Perhaps as Fudan is a more prestigious institution the students are also ‘better’ than at PSU, which is a ‘second-tier’ university. But with all these semi-comparable student groups I felt as if I was having a more positive effect than I did teaching oral English at PSU. And I did not feel elsewhere that I had to inveigle the students with entertaining titbits and clowning, thus feeling I was demeaning myself as a teacher. It seems more probable, therefore, that it is the role of foreign teacher of oral English at PSU that is problematic, rather than the individuals in the context.

I did find some ways of successfully combining entertainment with oral English development, using the lesson repetitions to gauge students’ responses to different activity types. One lesson combined two learning aims through loop input. Firstly, I wanted to give students an understanding of the rationale behind communicative-style oral fluency practice and, secondly, I provided oral fluency practice itself through a cued (but linguistically unstructured) speaking activity. Students engaged quite well with this activity, although it is impossible to know


the extent to which it achieved its learning objectives, as I did not post-test. The materials for this activity appear in Figure 7.2. Students began by working alone, making notes on a question each; I cut up sets of cards and had them laminated to make re-useable cue cards. Students then worked in groups of six, with each student presenting their thoughts on one question before the group discussed the topics. It engaged students quite well, although much of the group-based discussion was undertaken in Chinese. However, students were able to make salient comments in English at whole-class feedback.

Can you swim? Can you drive? Can you play a musical instrument?If you can do any of these, thinkabout how you learned to do it.

Is learning English similar to learningone of these things? Why or why not?How are they similar?How are they different?

Have you seen taxi drivers from otherprovinces using GPS (GlobalPositioning System) to find their wayaround Shanghai? Do you think thishelps them to learn their way aroundthe city? Why or why not?

When you are learning something newis it a good idea to struggle ( ) todo it yourself? Or is it better if someonetells you what to do? Why?

Do you know about the problem of‘deaf and dumb English’, wherelearners know lots of vocabulary andgrammar but can’t speak orunderstand much oral English?

Is this a problem for you?Why do you think this problem exists?Is there an answer to this problem?

If someone has learned all about thevocabulary and grammar of English,will they be able to speak andunderstand oral English?Why or why not?

What is the best way to learn English?Do you know anyone who has beenvery successful learning English oranother foreign language? How didshe or he learn it?

Could you do the same for learningEnglish? Why or why not?

Think about how you learned to speakand understand Chinese when youwere a child, before you went toprimary school. If you know any youngchildren, think about how theirlanguage develops.

Which comes first in a child’s languagedevelopment: meanings, or goodgrammar and complex vocabulary?Do children make grammar mistakes?Can they communicate meanings?

Is learning English as an adult similarto learning your first language as achild? Why or why not?

Do you know about ‘English corners’(where learners of English meettogether to practise their English)?

Have you ever been to an Englishcorner?Do you think English corners are agood way to improve your English?Why or why not?

Figure 7.2 Classroom materials for loop input activity


In another lesson I told a deliberately funny anecdote as a live listening, incorporating the target language of linking phrases and other discourse markers appropriate to the oral narrative genre. While listening, students completed a task that they had copied from the board; photocopying handouts for 500 students per week is impossible at PSU, so lessons have to be photocopy-free. The task served to scaffold students’ inductive learning of the genre structure of an oral anecdote and to revise the target phrases. Students then undertook controlled practice of the phrases through a matching exercise, so as to legitimize the subsequent oral fluency work as seemingly controlled practice and to provide actual controlled language practice for the weaker students. Students then prepared their own anecdotes using the same genre structure and told their stories in small groups. To ensure students listened to each other I had students re-use the listening task grid to make notes about each other’s stories. This allowed students to practise the genre structure and target phrases in a structured task and to develop oral fluency.

This was quite well received although some students chose to write scripts from which they read aloud, and in some classes there were students who refused to participate at all. I subsequently reflected in my field notes on the ‘bow wave of English’ that I created as I moved around the room monitoring, with students speaking English as I approached and many groups reverting to Chinese as soon as they thought I was out of earshot. But the activity ‘worked’ in that some students responded well and did the task, with the genre structure being used by many in the activity.

However, while these activities were reasonably successful and may suggest that ‘fun’ teaching can also be effective, two issues remain. Firstly, the activities I have described above, being aims-driven, are perhaps less entertaining that playing ‘Mallet’s mallet’-type games. In the feedback that I asked the students to write about each new activity type that I used in my own teaching, many students made comments to the effect that they ‘want to play funny games with the foreign teacher’ (this quote is from one student’s feedback to me). So although some students responded well, they may have preferred to be in the other foreign teachers’ classrooms, from which we often heard laughter.

A second issue I encountered was the differing views of two observers of the second lesson described above; Zoe and Hua came to the same session. Both observers had, like me, been teaching English language for more than ten years; Zoe is a Trinity Diploma examiner and Hua was my Chinese co-teacher at PSU. The three of us discussed the lesson afterwards in a teashop. Zoe’s feedback was very positive: the lesson aims were explicit to students and were coherent, the activities matched the stage aims well, and the students were involved and were using the target phrases well in their own anecdotes; she said it was one of the best lessons she had seen. Hua, however, commented that it was very enjoyable and that the students had enjoyed the chance to ‘have a break doing discussions’, but that it was quite unlike her teaching as ‘foreign teachers do fun activities’. She said she had seen foreign teachers’ activities and games before. Hua seemed entirely unable to ‘read’ the underlying rationale of the activities, and thought that my intention had been mainly for students to enjoy the lesson.


Hua’s viewpoint echoes Val’s experience of Chinese teachers’ attitudes towards communicative language teaching: ‘They see CLT as edutainment; [they ask] ‘how can this be effective?’’ (‘Old China Hands’ focus group 08/09/2007) Dan relates a similar critique from his Chinese co-teacher:

The first thing she said was ‘oh you do a lot of these activities but you don’t really seem to be teaching a grammar point’ … [she was] kind of dismissive of the whole thing of you have to get them up, you have to get them talking to each other and she’s like, ‘oh yeah, the students like it but sometimes they’re just no good, they make mistakes’.


These critiques worry me. If experienced Chinese teachers cannot ‘read’ the underlying aim of macro-skills development through using English, even when lesson aims are stated to students, it would seem unlikely that students would be able to do so. This undermines the very existence of an oral English course in which students use English in order to develop their spoken fluency.

As a result, students may struggle to evaluate teachers using any criteria other than the fun/not-fun binary that currently appears to be their benchmark. This is problematic as students’ evaluations are the only assessment of foreign teachers at PSU. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that the backwash on teachers from student evaluations causes them to accommodate students’ wants rather than needs. And this means entertaining the students.

Effects of ‘fun’ on teacher development

Teachers’ practices may change in response to the pressure to be fun, as described above. However, as CELTA-type courses teach a toolkit of ready-to-use activities, teachers may struggle to adapt their surface-level practice by creating aims-driven activities that are also fun, perhaps instead resorting to being ‘fun’ rather than maintaining underlying aims. This practice repeated over several years may de-skill teachers (as understood by CELTA/DELTA), meaning that if they undertake a further ELT qualification their skills are mainly those of entertaining rather than teaching. This would perhaps explain my DELTA-trainer friend’s comment, mentioned in Chapter 1, that Western teachers who have only taught in China are ‘hell to get through the diploma’.

A number of participants and informants commented on this issue and their various explanations of the process and its effects follow. It may appear that I am employing a somewhat quantitative logic here, in which a statistically significant proportion of the sample said ‘x’, so ‘x’ must be true for the wider population, but this is not my intention. Instead, in reporting eight people’s views in this section I want to convey the participants’ and informants’ various, nuanced interpretations of the phenomenon of teachers de-skilling, its possible antecedents, and some effects they perceive on short-course ELT-trained Western teachers who teach English in China. The fact that almost all the participants and


informants I interviewed perceived this problem may or may not be statistically significant. However, this does seem to be an important issue and so I have chosen to allow various voices on the topic:

They expected me to get up there and be the funny, foreign monkey. Let them play fun games, tell funny jokes, clown a bit, and then they’d get to go home…it’s so easy at this university to let yourself slip…To just go into class, get through the 80 minutes, and move on. And there’s definitely been weeks where I’ve done that…because, [there’s] the pressure from the students, and the pressure from management to amuse the students so they don’t complain. … It’s absolutely just like pulling teeth otherwise. It’s just so slow, if you don’t do something to force the students to engage, if you don’t make it fun, then it’s just absolutely horrible. You have 80 minutes of ‘say this, say this’.


When I started off [teaching at PSU], as you know, I really wanted to be a [career] teacher…but now I know I definitely don’t want to be a teacher…I think I’ve probably become a worse teacher if anything because I’ve forgotten how to do stuff…I’m shocked at the amount of grammar and stuff that I’ve forgotten. … [Most of the students] they would never ask you anything. They would go and ask their Chinese English teacher. … [Some Chinese friends] asked me for help with grammar and pronunciation and things, and it took me ages to sit there, to … work out what grammar point they were on about, and how exactly they would use it, and think how to answer, even, without making it into a joke. I found it really hard to tune my brain into, wow, they’re actually asking you a teaching question.


WILL: It’s a very comfortable life in China, you can switch to auto-pilot and cruise through, and make a decent living … you just need to turn up and do something, and you can almost do anything … listen to a song, tell them why you like it, sing a song, teach them a song, or talk about what you did that morning, how you’re feeling today … you could literally sit for an hour and talk about anything, and you’ve got a captive audience, or the appearance of a captive audience, whether or not they are, that’s debatable. Nobody would question what you’re doing.

PHIONA: What happens to people [teachers] as a result of this situation?WILL: Yeah, exactly, it’s quite decadent in a way. Not decadent so much, but

they sort of decay themselves. There’s no real motivation to do anything apart from just get out of bed. I think a lot of people find it frustrating and they leave because they want to find something else to do that’s more rewarding and more challenging. You don’t have any self-actualization; you just exist. You don’t need to be a good teacher.

(Will ‘interview’ 04/09/2007)


The problem with China-experienced [Western] teachers is that you have to un-train them. So they have been working, maybe, like me, in a university context, never had any support, and they survived, they’ve managed to get some kind of teaching strategy or methodology without any training, that from their point of view is pretty valid, but then you have to work with them and you see their limitations, but they don’t take anything on board anymore because they can become quite arrogant because they’ve been, they’ve had way too much attention for their limited talent … and maybe worshipped by their students for doing the fun stuff … China experience is not necessarily a good thing, I would say.

(Yasper ‘interview’ 06/09/2007)

There’s more expected [of teachers] in a Western setting, in Spain or whatever, the students are expecting much more from us as teachers, whereas here we’re getting away with a lot less, and that’s why I think it does de-skill you because you’re not being challenged in the same way all the time by the students. Here, the students accept hangman or whatever instead of saying, ‘this is shit’.

(Val ‘Old China Hands’ focus group 08/09/2007)

If you want to stick with teaching you shouldn’t stay here [at PSU] too long … you get bored, you get disillusioned, you think all teaching is like this, and you de-skill yourself. ... The resources here are crap … most of the students don’t know what they want. You get pushed along with the flow and you get too used to it … you can coast along. … And after a while you stop caring.


The teaching paradigm, say, in the UK compared to here, they’re so different that, they’re apples and oranges, aren’t they? So the skills set that one develops here might not be totally useful in the UK, just as the skills set that the teachers develop in Europe, and then they come here. … They’re facing some real, structural differences. But that’s not to say that the teachers are learning rubbish [here], I wouldn’t frame it that way, it’s just different skills, it’s just a different appreciation of the context that you’re teaching [in]. … It’s more about fitting in, in that soft focus sort of way.


There is broad agreement among these teachers that the experience of teaching in this context may not allow for the development of CELTA-type teaching skills. And, as Karen, Val, and Phil note, this is problematic if teachers subsequently teach outside of China, where their teaching may be judged on its effectiveness against CELTA-like criteria.

As Phil says, however, teachers may be able to acquire other ‘soft focus’ skills, perhaps including lowering students’ inhibitions, building classroom dynamics, and motivating students. Leo comments:


I think [teaching at PSU] it makes them [the foreign teachers], when they use those [CELTA-type teaching] skills again, they’re not good at it because they haven’t practised it for a long time, because they practised how to make students happy and have fun. So the skills of making students happy and having fun have increased, which I think is also a skill; it’s part of teaching. It’s making it an enjoyable environment. And basically in China that’s what you do, they are your customers, so you’re making your customers happy.


Will echoes the idea of Chinese students making different demands of their foreign English teachers, comparing these to the demands of students he encountered in Vietnam and Russia:

China stands out as very different. … I think students [elsewhere] are more, in my experience working in different countries, maybe more sophisticated, or have had more experience working with foreigners, or they share the same values educationally. … I think the expectations of education are more similar [in Vietnam and Russia, to the expectations in teachers’ home countries]. In these places you need to prove yourself, it’s a validity question; face validity as well as real validity. But in China, you can just go out and sing a song and that’s fine, you’re accepted, it’s more about the mood, if you create the right mood then people are happy … Chinese students, I sometimes wonder if they really do want to learn. They say they do, they know they need to, but I think they want it to be as painless, fun, and easy; the most comfortable way possible.


The pressure to be ‘fun’, therefore, has implications for teachers’ practice and development. Having explored the constraints on effective teaching felt by foreign teachers at PSU, an obvious question for discussion is why. Why do students push for teachers to be entertaining rather than effective when some of the very same students say they need/want to learn English? And in Shanghai, unlike elsewhere in China, the job market is such that students may well need English to be competitive. The next sections explore possible origins of the pressure to be fun.

Imagining funny foreign teachers

Having described the teachers’ experiences of the pressure to be ‘fun’, I now consider some possible reasons for this pressure and examine the ways in which the participants experience it. The two sources of pressure are bottom up, from students themselves both in class and in their written evaluations of their foreign teachers, and top down from academic management, primarily in response to students’ written evaluations.


Xiaoli explains that, for students, the atmosphere in a foreign teacher’s class is more important than content, even if this reduces teachers’ effectiveness:

XIAOLI: Actually students just enjoy the atmosphere. If they do enjoy the atmosphere they will cooperate with [the] foreign teacher.

PHIONA: Do you trust the teacher to know what to do to make you learn oral English?

XIAOLI: Yeah, of course.PHIONA: And what if the teacher is trying to be fun, and by trying to be fun

the teaching is less good?XIAOLI: Mmmm. It’s going to be a possibility. I don’t think it matters, as

long as the students enjoy the class, that’s more important. PHIONA: So it’s more important that they enjoy than that they learn?XIAOLI: Yeah.PHIONA: Why?XIAOLI: Eh, because learning, the students are, they feel bored. They just

want to learn something from foreigners in a good way, in a way that they enjoy. If you make them do this [course] in a funny way, and they will learn it.


Xiaoli’s use of the word ‘funny’ is intriguing. It may be that she means ‘fun’ in terms of students ‘enjoy[ing] the atmosphere’ of a foreign teacher’s class. But it may also mean ‘funny’ as in strange, that is, foreign teachers being conceptualized as a very different experience from Chinese teachers. If so, the purpose of foreign teachers may be to offer students an insight into a different cultural world. As discussed in Chapter 3, foreign Others are constructed by Chinese discourses as very different from the Chinese Self (e.g. Cai 2003).

The students in the focus group were similarly ambiguous over the fun/funny and funny/strange distinction, confirming students’ desire for the creation of an enjoyable atmosphere in class but also highlighting perceived differences between Chinese and foreign teachers:

Foreign teacher you respect from your heart because you have the happy time. Chinese teacher you respect, maybe, from head … they treat me like [they’re a] teacher.

(Ping ‘PSU Students’ focus group 12/06/2009)

If the teacher will be cheerful I will pay more attention … I like foreign teacher to be fun, like actor, could told you about anything. … I want to see he is very nice. Easygoing, funny, can share the different ideas, don’t have the distant … humorous, arouse our interest in learning English, you feel flexible. … In the foreign teacher class you can do whatever you like, you can do more communication with him. … He must be fun, yes, and vividly.

(Guo ‘PSU Students’ focus group 12/06/2009)


Leo attributes these demands to students’ constructions of Western foreigners in general, a perception revisited in more detail in Chapter 8:

[The students] perceive Westerners, well, the ones they encounter, because usually they only encounter quite young, single Westerners, as ‘open’. And this is a term only used in China. Open means ‘will have sex anytime, anywhere, with anyone’. … Open also means open-minded, it also means warmth, it also means friendly. But I think the reason why they use the word ‘open’ is ... because they’re seeking, they’re identifying any foreigners as someone opposite from them, doing everything that is opposite from what they are allowed to do. It’s almost a rebellious thing, for a lot of our students, they sort of look up to a Westerner because they feel a Westerner is allowed to do a lot of things that they’re not allowed to do. … I think they [the students] already came in with a perception of what Westerners are like. … [They think] we’re lively, warm, optimistic, energetic, fun … not as serious as Chinese teachers.


Students’ view that foreign teachers are, or should be, ‘fun’ may thus be because of stereotyping about Western foreigners more generally. Phil explains that, ‘to Chinese students, Western equals fun’ (‘interview’ 29/10/2007). Related to this, Chinese language schools often use Westerners’ images with slogans like ‘English is fun!’ in advertisements, which may create/perpetuate the notion that Westerners are somehow more ‘fun’ than Chinese people. Xiaoli explains her perception:

Foreigners are kind of very hot and very friendly … hot is kind of, they’re always laughing [and] even [though] they don’t know you they will smile at you, you will feel, when you are with them, you won’t feel cold. Your mind is always running.


It may also be that student pressure for the foreign teachers to be ‘fun’ may come from students’ and their peers’ previous experiences with other foreign teachers, as Karen explains:

I guess it comes from the other [foreign] teachers, and [the students] talking to each other about the different classes and hearing maybe past students from the year before, there’s probably, like, common knowledge now that everyone talks about, like, ‘we have these [oral] English lessons and … you just have to go, and no-one takes it seriously’. And I definitely don’t think the students take it seriously.


Thus there appears to be a cycle at PSU, in which students’ expectations about foreign teachers are created by peers’ and previous experiences of foreign teachers


Construction of foreign teachers

as ‘fun’

Pressure felt by foreign teachers

to be ‘fun’

Foreign teachers

respond by being ‘fun’

Evidence that foreign teachers

ARE ‘fun’

Figure 7.3 Conceptual model of expectations and performances

and perhaps other constructions of Westerners from media and other sources. These constructions then put pressure on foreign teachers to live up to expectations by performing the role of ‘fun’ foreigners. This in turn perpetuates notions of foreign teachers as ‘fun’. This is similar to the ‘staged authenticity’ of performed ‘exoticism’ for tourists’ benefit (Ateljevic and Doorne 2005). This cycle is conceptualized in Figure 7.3.

Bottom up and top down: Pressures to be fun

The idea of oral English with a Western teacher being entertaining frequently occurs in students’ evaluations of their foreign teachers and in discussions with Chinese students and teachers. Phil comments:

I’ve done three or four semesters’ worth of feedback and this word [‘fun’] pops up all the time for the students, ‘fun, fun, more interesting, more fun, we want more fun’… it is quite sobering. I sincerely believe that I delivered probably some of the better classes last semester but I was probably one of the lower-scoring teachers because I didn’t make it a game show.


Student evaluations are of paramount importance in measuring teacher success in the absence of any measurement of teacher effectiveness. These are different constructs, and this issue is examined in more detail in Chapter 10. Students’ evaluations are the only measure of teachers’ performance at PSU because students’ oral English is not pre or post-tested so as to evaluate teachers on students’ development of communication skills. The students’ implicit criteria for successful teachers make fascinating, if depressing, reading, with students frequently describing their teacher as (sometimes insufficiently) ‘fun’, ‘funny’, ‘active’, ‘handsome’/’pretty’, and ‘a good actor’/’actress’ (student evaluations,


2007–2008). As an example, the comments on three student evaluations read as follows:

When I was in the classroom I felt very happy and relaxed because the teacher was so interesting, he always laughed. So hope he would keep smile always.

Sometimes the course is interesting. But sometimes it is not. I hope teacher can bring more fun to us.

Hello teacher! I think that your performance is good. But in my opinion you can’t give us a strong sense of humor. As a oral teacher, you can be more humorous and active. I (will) also appreciate for your kind smile. It’s really good.

(‘Student Evaluations’ 2008)

Dan describes the pressure the evaluations exert on foreign teachers:

If they don’t like you they’ll complain, and the evaluations will be down. And the university will say [to Leo or Phil], ‘you have to get rid of this teacher’. … The students have the power … to force, to bring things to a head. But you’d have to be a fairly driving, dogmatic teacher to get that rebellion from the students. … The big bulk of them just don’t care.


Thus there is a direct pressure on teachers to keep students happy through the backwash of teacher evaluations, in which most students demand ‘fun’.

However, students’ demands for ‘fun’ may be a misunderstanding, perhaps attributable to students’ perceptions of differences between foreign teachers’ practice and their own cultures of learning. Phil explains this possibility:

‘[F]un’ may be the only word [the students] have to describe the emotions and experience of self-directed learning, or the (newly-found) freedom to determine and shape the direction of the learning as led by foreign classroom sensibilities. Maybe what student ‘A’ means as fun (superficial play), is different from what ‘B’ means (engaging activities), and ‘C’ means (stimulating alternative cultural viewpoints), and ‘D’s meaning of ‘humorously delivered’. Are we overlaying a pejorative sense of fun (light, inconsequential, and humour-based) over a more complex variety of shades of meaning?

(Phil ‘e-mail’ 06/10/2008)

So the demand for ‘fun’, at least as it occurs in students’ evaluations, may be an inexact term for a number of different phenomena that students may demand. However the fact remains that students consistently rank most highly those teachers that deliver ‘fun’ teaching rather than teachers who would be considered ‘effective’ against CELTA criteria. But the performance from foreign teachers


that students demand is complex, and does go beyond ‘fun’ alone; this is considered in Chapter 10.

There is also a ‘top down’ pressure, coming mainly from Leo, the Director of Studies. Karen explains her perception of pressure from above and below:

It’s hard to put my finger on what exactly we are supposed to be doing. I think in a way we’re supposed to be just entertaining them [the students] … not really teaching them. … From what I’ve heard from Leo … that seems to be kind of what we do here. … So I spend half of the time planning my lessons thinking ‘right, I want them to be able do this … so that I can show them how to do that’ and then … I’ll think ‘yes but that’s not fun’. … I know we’re not there to entertain them, but if I don’t entertain them and make it fun, they will literally not listen to me, and start speaking in Chinese.


Phil acknowledges that the foreign teachers experience pressure both from students and from Leo. But he blames the teachers’ resorting to ‘fun’ on the teachers themselves. In particular, he cites teachers’ own ulterior, short-term motivations, their minimal training, and their desire to feel in control:

Principled classroom teaching to a curriculum is I think relatively complex and, one might argue, far beyond the preparation most TEFL teacher-training courses bring. Clearly some of the teachers see this as short-term and treat it as short term so they gravitate towards ‘fun’ as a unifying classroom principle as it is easier … They can then exculpate themselves to an extent from a debate about their individual role and extended responsibility in their own classroom by simplifying it to being about fun feedback and making that externally led by management and the students. … Are the teachers in a way limiting the parameters of the class in a way that they feel they have a degree of control? Student laugh good, student not laugh not good? Easier to measure a laugh than a learn. … I fear this is an uncharitable view as the feedback is clear that the students want ‘fun’ … maybe it is a combination of lack of experience and possibly lack of willingness/professionalism that leads the teachers towards the elevation of ‘fun’.

(Phil ‘e-mail’ 06/10/2008)

Phil seems correct in his assertion that teachers and students may overly simplistically measure teacher effectiveness against the binary of fun/not fun. However, my own experience suggests that resorting to ‘fun’ teaching is not the preserve only of inexperienced, minimally trained, short-term teachers. While teacher quality does appear to be measured primarily by students’ responses, this may be because this is the only salient way in which teachers’ work is appraised, through students’ evaluations. If anything, this became worse during my fieldwork at PSU because, in the 2008–2009 academic year, Phil chose to link teachers’ bonus payments to their students’ evaluations.


This also puts pressure on Leo, who himself perceives pressure from students’ evaluations. He describes his own accountability as recruiting teachers and managing them in such a way as to meet students’ demands:

I remember in a teachers meeting this is what I said: ‘Boys, you know your job. Go into your classes, keep them happy, don’t get complaints. Next week is student questionnaires, I would like to see results. You know what to do’. … Make them happy, play a game, entertain them, tell them jokes. I don’t care [what you do], but I want results.


This pressure Leo that perceives begins at the point of hiring teachers:

I’m looking for those kind of teachers, those that can be fun. I’ve been here for two years, I know exactly what the students want and I know exactly what they need, and it’s not the same thing. What they want is to have fun; what they need is to improve their English … [but] the university feels that their objective is to make the students happy, that’s the number one goal.


Leo explains how this pressure affects his teacher recruitment policy:

I could go out and demand my teachers to be better but it wouldn’t work. They’ll say, ‘oh but my students love me, my being a clown!’ … I got told ‘keep the cost down, hire teachers, make sure they’re not fucking any students, make sure they’re not turning up in dirty jeans, make sure they’re not sick … and if they can teach or not, oh, that’s up to you’. … If I raised my demands I’d make it more difficult for myself to get teachers. … Why change it if no-one’s telling me to change it and it’s working? … It’s almost like a show. It’s sad to say it, when I first came in I was like, ‘past tense, grammar, that fact’ and I was like, ‘no one’s enjoying this, the students are not enjoying it. The guy [teacher] next to me’s got much better reviews [evaluations] than I do, but I’m definitely working harder than him, what the hell’s going on? That’s it. I’m going to be a clown, a stand-up comedian.


Leo’s situation appears unenviable, but in several interviews Phil lays blame for the ‘fun’ phenomenon with Leo himself:

I actually think it boils down to the DoS [Director of Studies, i.e. Leo] at the moment ... I think that his primary motivating factor in the classroom is to provide a fun, entertaining environment. I think that’s how he believes that the greatest learning can take place.



[Leo] he wants the job to be fun for himself and for all the teachers, and I think that culture does seep into all elements.


I tell him ‘you can’t really measure a class by a laugh-o-meter’, [but] it happens, it is what’s happening [at PSU]. I know you find that a very depressing thought.


Leo’s role in managing the PSU teachers is explored further in Chapter 10. But it appears that Phil and Leo are blaming each other. For Leo, the problem is Phil’s use of the students’ evaluations as a measure of the teachers’ and Leo’s own work. For Phil, the problem is Leo’s interpretation of this as a push for fun above all. But Leo’s interpretation is understandable, as the backwash created by student evaluations elevates fun above teacher effectiveness.

Crossing cultures or reinforcing stereotypes?

Symbolic interactionism theorizes that people respond to things on the basis of the meanings those things hold for them, and that these meanings are produced through social interactions (Blumer 1986). As a result, PSU students may, quite naturally, judge foreign teachers from within their own symbolic paradigm. Students, if they buy into the Self/Other discourse, may therefore judge foreign teachers negatively as a category because of the behaviour of their own teacher and the meanings that these behaviours hold for them. Three students explain:

[The foreign teachers] just sit on the tables, and you never see a Chinese teacher sit on the tables, never. So maybe the Western teachers give us the impression they are fun and we have highly expectation of them, be the foreign friends. A different expectation for the foreign teachers.

(Chao ‘PSU Students’ focus group 12/06/2009)

We see the TV dramas, we see Western teachers always willing [to] communicate with students. … But I don’t understand. In the Western education is talk, talk, talk, and so how someone will learning?

(Lili ‘PSU Students’ focus group 12/06/2009)

The foreign teachers, they don’t bring books to class and the students think the teacher don’t bring books and seems doesn’t have a lot of plans, they just pick a topic and write on the board and say, ‘this class we just talk a topic’. This is not a way Chinese teacher do a class, so this is not a good teacher. … We think the foreign teacher is an idiot.

(Huang ‘PSU Students’ focus group 12/06/2009)


While these are only a few students’ perspectives, and further research among students is necessary, it may be that teachers’ intended meanings are being misunderstood. Students’ apparent interpretations of teachers’ outward behaviours are shown in Figure 7.4.

Shared outwardsignifier

The teachers sit on the tables,chew gum in class, laugh with the students, tell funny stories about their travel and other experiences.

Language learning isabout communication;I am trying to be friendly and approachable.

Our teacher is nice but isnot a ‘proper’ teacher;our teacher seems morelike a friend than ateacher.

Students are expectedto talk, in groups,without the teachernecessarily being partof the discussion.

The aim is to increasestudents’ total outputopportunities, outputbeing a route tolanguage development.

All I am doing is talking tomy friends. I am notlearning anything;the teachers cannot teachproperly.

Learning outcomes mayappear to be intangible;there is no clear list ofquantifiable languageitems to be learned.

Oral English aims at skills development rather than language input; teachers aim to improve students’ oral fluency not add to their stock of language.

We’re not learninganything; this is too basic;the foreign teacher canonly teach low-levellanguage points; we knowthis stuff!

Teachers do notcorrect much.

The aim is fluencyrather than accuracy.

The teacher does notknow how, or cannot bebothered, to correct ourmistakes.

The textbook is usedas a resource and isnot covered in greatdepth.

New Interchange is not a speaking skills development course and so the topics are used selectively to achieve the aims of oral English skillsdevelopment.

The teacher does not‘know’ grammar; thecourse, or the teacher, isnot serious because wedon’t need to ‘learn’ thewhole textbook.

There are no ‘correct’answers to discussionquestions.

The aim is to havestudents use English indiscussions, as a routeto speaking skillsdevelopment.

The answers cannot bevery important (so this ispointless). Or: the teacherdoesn’t know theanswers.

Teachers resort to ‘fun’ to get students to respond inclass.

Teachers expect studentresponses (because thisis part of their cultureof learning).

Western teachers are funbut not very goodteachers; all they do ispointless activities.

Teachers’ intendedmeaning

Students’ potentialinterpretation

Figure 7.4 Misunderstandings of foreign teachers’ behaviours


This may result in students expecting little of their foreign teachers:

My engineering students have the opportunity to go to America at the end of their junior year…They didn’t tell me at first, I found out a little over half way through. And I asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier? This class would have been completely different if I’d have known. I would have structured it to make it more useful for you going abroad.’ And they’re ‘oh, well, you know, it’s just our English class’. … It just hadn’t occurred to them … they have all of their real classes and then they just get to come to our class and goof around and have fun.


This may at times go beyond low expectations, with students sometimes ridiculing their foreign teachers. Karen describes an incident that took place in May 2008, following a university-wide minute’s silence for the victims of the Sichuan earthquake. All the students and teachers had taken part in a minute’s silence in the morning, and the class Karen describes took place in the afternoon of the same day.

[The students] think of Western people as clowns. And I think that’s dangerous, like, for example, what the students did in Steph’s class, with the minute’s silence. There was Steph, Claire, and her friend John, and [the students] wanted them to stand up the front, the three of them, face the class, and do a minute’s silence, heads bowed, just the three of them, to, like, show their respect to China because of the earthquake. And personally, I think that’s really wrong, and I think we need to be careful that they’re not just viewing us as these kind of toys that they can do what they want with … I think that there is a fine line between treating us like we are just clowns, and then treating us like we’re toys. Like, clowns and toys are pretty similar. And I think that that’s what’s getting a bit dangerous about it, is that, if we’re not careful they’re going to portray all Western people as that … I think they need to realize that that’s not how all Western people are. And like, OK, we’re outgoing and we’re open about things, but we’re not just, yeah. I think a lot of my students do portray Western people as idiots.


Beth echoes this, giving an example of the low educational expectations that PSU students may have of their foreign teacher:

The students want entertainers, they’ll tell you that. Was it Ed, last semester, wanted his, with the last class, he goes in and he says, ‘right, OK, you know this is our very last class…what do you want to do?’ And his students were like, ‘we want you to dance’. [And] he did, and they absolutely loved it…they wanted a foreign entertainer.



These experiences can be theorized as both a cause and an effect of Occidentalism. It appears that students’ constructions of Western foreigners more generally informs their expectations about foreign teachers. Students’ Occidentalism may also be informed by their contact with ‘fun’ foreign teachers, in which reduced caricatures are reified by the pressure exerted on teachers to correspond with students’ imagined constructions of ‘typical Westerners’. One ‘hidden curriculum’ outcome from oral English is thus an entrenchment of reductive views of foreigners.

This has important and negative implications for students’ cross-cultural competence as it may be that by learning to disrespect foreign oral English teachers, Chinese students transfer this judgement more widely to other ‘foreigners’, about whom there seems to be a large amount of negative stereotyping. At the same time, as discussed further in Chapter 8, the teachers reduce and infantilize the Chinese students. It seems to be, then, that rather than crossing cultures the contact situation at PSU is actually erecting barriers to intercultural communication, on both sides, as students and teachers leave the situation with pre-existing constructions of the foreign Other reified by ‘experience’. This is clearly a negative force in a globalizing world. There are also implications for teachers’ identity and these are explored in Chapters 11 and 12.

Conclusion

This chapter has examined the issue of ‘fun’, and the pressure participants perceive to live up to students’ Occidentalized constructions of the foreign Other. As shown in Figure 7.1 the phenomenon is self perpetuating: teachers who bend to students’ pressure to be fun reinforce students’ notions that foreign teachers are fun, which creates further pressure on teachers.

So cultural misunderstanding is one result of the pressure foreign teachers perceive to be ‘fun’. But perhaps a more significant effect is that of the de-skilling of teachers and the consequent negative impact on their morale. This de-skilling results from teachers acquiring the skills of entertainers rather than the skills of teachers. While there is some overlap in these skill sets, it appears that the participants are learning to entertain rather than teach. Teachers’ morale then suffers, particularly among those teachers, like Dan and Karen, whose initial motivation was to pursue teaching careers, but also among teachers, like Ryan, whose stated motivation was simply to experience China. This results in teachers who perceive their job is to ‘get through the lesson’, and who conclude that teaching is unskilled work in which one may become ‘trapped’; these issues are discussed in Chapter 11.

This may also mean that teachers like Dan may choose to leave China so as to pursue ‘proper teaching’ elsewhere. This is understandable from Dan’s own point of view, and indeed I also found the role of oral English teacher at PSU to be extremely frustrating professionally. But it means that committed teachers are being lost to Chinese classrooms. However, the program continues to grow at PSU, and more and more teachers are employed to teach more classes every year. The next chapter explores why this might be. And it does not seem to be about English language teaching.

8 It’s not about English teaching

This chapter explores the possibility that oral English teaching at PSU in its present form cannot be expected to succeed; there are simply too many constraints. These include the issues explored in previous chapters, of unexamined differences between the teachers’ and students’ cultures of learning, circumstantial constraints, and the assessment backwash that renders oral English somewhat intangible. It also includes the teacher accountability system as it currently exists, in which foreign teachers perceive pressure from students and managers mainly to be ‘fun’ rather than effective. Given these conflicting pressures, the outlook for oral English at PSU is bleak.

However, the PSU foreign teacher program grew in size and scope between 2007 and 2011; the foreign teachers are now employed to teach oral English classes for students in other programs of study, including Masters degrees. Additionally, some foreign teachers now teach other subjects, including a course entitled ‘Western culture’ that Beth, Ryan, and Leo piloted in 2008–2009. So, quite the opposite of the ‘bleak’ outlook that I have described, the University Cooperation program at PSU is going from strength to strength. Given the difficulties described above, this is counterintuitive.

But perhaps the mistake is to frame the endeavour in which the foreign teachers are involved at PSU as English teaching at all. Instead, a new conceptualization may be required, in which the participants are engaged not in English teaching but in something else. This chapter explores the tantalizing nature of that ‘something else’, examining possible purposes behind the hiring of foreign teachers to teach oral English at PSU. I start with a discussion of the participants’ own motivations and the way these influence their work. I then turn to the question of teaching ‘culture’ as part of oral English teaching and, so, to an inductive definition of the foreign teacher role. As the title of this book suggests, the de facto role is quite different from the teachers’ own purposes and understandings and it is in this sense that they are shanghaied in Shanghai.

Foreign teacher recruitment

Minimally qualified Western teachers may be motivated to work in China for reasons other than teaching and, perhaps as both a cause and effect of foreign


teachers’ association with ‘backpacker teachers’, English language teaching may be regarded as a low-status expatriate role. Val explains:

TESOL has that image; it has an image problem. … If you want to travel and earn some money, then, yeah, you can be a backpacker and teach. … It’s not associated with people who know what they’re doing.

(Val ‘Old China Hands’ focus group 08/09/2007).

Against this background, it is difficult to attract and retain well-qualified ELT professionals in the numbers required by China’s educational institutions including universities. Dan explains his understanding of the wider Asian market for foreign English teachers:

It’s a teachers’ market because everyone wants to hire, so if someone’s a total washout at a school in China or Korea, they can go down to Indonesia or Thailand and pop up teaching somewhere else.


Leo explains his experiences of the difficulties this causes:

The teaching market is such a seller’s market [i.e. the teachers who sell their labour]. I mean it’s not like I can just fire you, because if I fire you I need someone there right away to come in and do it. And so the lesser of the two things would be to have some unqualified teacher keep on teaching, rather than have no teacher to teach. … The bottom line is I need my 12 teachers to show up, smile, show their white teeth, and open their mouths and speak English, that’s the bottom line. If they can, I would like them to be active, I would like them to be motivating their students, to build their students’ confidence, and I would like them to be engaging, to be helping the students. If they can even do better than that, I would like them to go into their lessons with, maybe, an aim, and a focus on exactly what they teach, and try to teach it. … But if they can’t do that, it’s OK. … That’s the reality. It’s a seller’s market.


One factor affecting teacher recruitment in mainland China is that institutions must compete for teachers with South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, all of which are in a position to offer higher salaries (ESL Cafe 2008). The salaries of the oral English teachers at PSU, while substantially higher than those of local English teachers, are much lower than expatriate salaries such as those of, for example, teachers at international schools. Leo explains the constraint that salaries place on teacher recruitment:

10,000 Yuan [RMB; per month] with co-pay insurance? [i.e. the teachers contribute to the cost of their health insurance.] You cannot get qualified

It’s not about English teaching 153

teachers for that. So although the students may want more than fun, the type of teachers who take these jobs are the backpackers.


Thus the PSU salary is problematic as well-qualified teachers can find better paid work elsewhere.

Ryan explains his understanding of teacher recruitment, framing teachers’ motivation types as a binary of ‘running towards’ and ‘running away from’:

The people who apply for and get these jobs are those who are willing to uproot and leave their present situation. People who are willing to leave everything they know and love and be whisked off to a foreign corner of the world are usually either running from something or running to something. That something takes precedence over their job as a teacher.

(Ryan ‘e-mail’ 21/08/2008)

Ryan describes his own motivation of ‘running towards’ opportunities unavailable at home:

I was running towards life experience, towards a deeper understanding of the world and its people, towards the unknown, towards a free life. Teaching was my means of doing so, but it was never my goal, it was never my purpose. If they had said that garbage men are needed in Asia and that garbage men make enough to live a decent life in Asia, then I probably would have been a garbage man. … Teaching is the grunt work that I have to do [to be here].

(Ryan ‘e-mail’ 21/08/2008)

Leo concurs with Ryan’s view of his own motivation, and of this as a common motivation type:

A lot of the teachers’ motives are to be here to have a good time. Just like Ryan, he’s very honest, ‘I’m not here to teach, I’m not interested in teaching, I don’t care about teaching, but I can teach, I can smile, I’m White, I’m Canadian, I can make fun, I can be a clown, you pay me, I get along, travel around’. That’s what a lot of the teachers want to do, is travel around.


However, teachers who are instrumentally motivated, such as by the desire to ‘travel around’, may contribute to the problem of ‘fun’ teaching described in Chapter 7, as Phil explains:

I don’t think most of them [the foreign teachers] are perceiving themselves as entering a career [in Education] or a proper job … In their heads they’re only coming for a year so they’re going to basically stay in a comfort zone for


a year, and that comfort zone is keeping them [the students] entertained. … The motivation’s more a year’s worth of stories … [teaching in China] it’s just another bar story.


As discussed in Chapter 7, some of the participants perceived that expectations of ‘fun’ teaching may be caused in part by students’ prior experience of foreign teachers who do not question students’ demand for ‘fun teaching and so may perpetuate the notion that ‘foreign equals fun’. But not all foreign teachers are instrumentally motivated. Among the study participants, only Ryan did not express at least some teaching-related motivation, at least initially. As a result, all, including Ryan, struggled with the identity attributed to them, of foreign clowns passing through; this is discussed further in Chapter 11.

Beth explains that she has learned to counter the image problem of foreign teachers by seeking legitimacy through her qualifications, but says:

It makes me angry, because I feel like, ‘why should I? I don’t have to justify my background to you. I’m here as a teacher, the default for most cultures is that you give a teacher respect of some sort.


Leo confirms that foreign teachers may have to legitimize themselves through qualifications:

[Foreign teachers] come in dressed in, like, jeans and flip-flops, and their [students’] first impression is that they’re an idiot. If you take out a PhD certificate … then they’ll assume you’re knowledgeable. … In China, people are identified by who they are and what they have done, not by what they can do or their personality. … They’ll see Todd or Ryan and think, yeah, a clown. … If Ryan had a PhD and ten years experience and he wore a suit, he could sit down and say, ‘my justification for doing all these meaningless activities is because I have a PhD’, and they’ll go, ‘oooh, yes, that must be true’.


Sadly, though, the reality of the teacher recruitment market may make the teacher type that Leo describes exactly the ‘default’ that the students encounter. This would serve to perpetuate Beth’s problem.

Foreign teachers or foreign creatures?

But the discursive construction of ‘foreign idiots’ runs much deeper than the issue of many foreign teachers’ own instrumental motivations. As discussed in Chapter 3, there is a view in China that Chinese and foreign cultures are irreconcilably different and that there is a benefit for Chinese people in gaining skills and confidence in ‘dealing with foreigners’; this was actually the title of a


training course for Chinese managers that I co-taught in Shanghai in 2003–2004. Beth explains her understanding of the binary Self/Other distinction:

Here in China you get identified as the Western Other, there’s no acknowledgement that there are various cultures … you’re White so you are American. It’s this view of monolithic culture, singular.


Dan and Ollie explain what they perceive the students gain from contact with foreign teachers:

They can acquire some experience with foreigners … but 80 minutes, once a week, maybe they acquire the sight of a foreigner … it’s like going to the zoo, because they go and see this unique creature in a safe environment … and they get to interact with us in a safe way … like, some kind of a petting zoo, or in some cases a heavy petting zoo [Dan is referring to the PSU teachers who pursue sexual relationships with their students; this is discussed in Chapter 9]. … As a teacher, do I want to stay in this zoo? No, I don’t.


It’s an opportunity to have access to someone who’s foreign … I don’t think it’s necessarily about English, no. I think it’s a much broader thing. … It’s not not about English, but it’s much more about Western culture. … We can’t employ Black Africans or Indian people … If you’re not White, if you don’t look European you can’t be employed as an English teacher … The universities just won’t accept them [non-White foreign teachers], they just want White foreigners, because they represent ‘Western culture’.


These quotes are echoed by other participants’ and students’ views of foreign teachers as representatives of ‘foreign culture’, and constructed as very different from and, crucially, lesser than Chinese teachers.

This may explain Leo’s perception of the need to ‘perform foreignness’ in order to gain legitimacy as a foreign teacher, particularly as he is ethnically Chinese. As discussed in Chapter 3, performativity is an important factor in identity negotiation. But the ‘foreignness’ Leo performs is not (or perhaps not just) his own notion of ‘Westernness’. Instead, he describes his conscious effort to differentiate his behaviour from that of his construction of Chinese teachers:

The animation, the walking around the classroom, the jokes, the humour, the chewing of the gum … the making fun of the students is … all a part of my job. An act to make me as different as possible, to make me as animated as possible, and to make me as interesting and humorous as possible, to attract the students’ attention.



In a later interview, Leo responds to his own quote, explaining his rationale:

I had to prove myself … I might look Chinese but I’m really Western. … If you look Chinese and you act Chinese why would they accept you? I’m not going to wear my Canadian passport around my neck every time I go in. … I have to make myself into this fool at first. Once they accept you as a laowai [foreigner] … you can be knowledgeable.


Stereotyping about ‘fun’ foreigners, from which Leo’s performance seems to be derived, also results in a demand for teachers that look and behave like Chinese constructions of ‘typical Westerners’.

If foreign teachers are mainly employed as foreigners rather than as teachers, Leo’s hiring policy makes sense. He explains that he prefers to employ teachers who are young, blond(e), bubbly, attractive, and entertaining, even if unqualified as English language teachers. Beth, who analysed possible reasons for various teachers’ scores on the student evaluation forms, further explains this preference for young, physically attractive teachers:

PHIONA: Ryan has no [language teaching] qualifications, no training.BETH: No. But in his case, he does pretty well [i.e. students like him]. PHIONA:: Would he, if he looked like you or me [30s and female]? Or fifty?BETH: Um, right. Yeah, Ollie, who does have training … he’s too old.PHIONA:: He’s 40.BETH: Yeah, he’s 40, which is too old for Chinese students, because they

don’t think he’s attractive. They would relate to him … It doesn’t matter what Ollie does, he will never be one of the top evaluations.


Against this background, and with the students’ evaluations as the only salient evaluation of teachers’ work, Leo’s policy of hiring young, fun teachers to behave as ‘foreign monkeys’ is perhaps understandable. But there is a vicious circle, here, of imagination, representation, performance, and reification. The more innocuous part of the foreign teacher’s role is to be students’ point of contact with the non-Chinese world. But the pressure that teachers experience to perform an Occidentalist notion of ‘Westernness’ suggests that the overarching purpose is to represent and reify foreignness in a way that distinguishes the foreign Other from the Chinese Self, bolstering Chinese self-esteem (and perhaps also nationalism, as discussed in Chapter 3). PSU discourses position foreign teachers as exotic curiosities, akin to zoo animals. Less than foreign teachers, the participants feel they are foreign creatures.

Teaching culture: Western artefacts and meanings

Another reason to hire foreign teachers is the teaching of ‘culture’, and this was often mentioned (although always in very vague terms) as part of the foreign


teachers’ role. But ‘foreign culture’ is amorphous and this section problematizes the what and how of culture teaching in oral English. Western cultures appear to be the de facto cultures to be learned about whenever there is any mention of covering ‘culture’ in class. The role of English as a lingua franca was rarely acknowledged in any classroom, staffroom, or co-teacher discussion that I heard, and my own PSU students mostly dismissed the notion that they might one day use English with other non-native users. (In fact, most anticipated little future use for English at all.) Culture, and indeed English itself, was therefore mostly framed as an exercise in learning about ‘the West’ and, specifically, in comparing (an idealized and essentialized) China with (a constructed, imagined) West.

As for how culture might be learned, or learned about; in common with the treatment of language described in Chapter 6, the objective of Chinese students and teachers seems to be to learn facts about Western culture(s) rather than to learn how to operate in them or learn about culture more generally, including students’ own cultures. Indeed, this was the view taken by some of the foreign teachers. Ollie, for example, explains his approach:

A group I had … kept asking me about culture and so, all right, 20 minutes, last class, ‘we’ll do something on culture’. So I put up on the board, uh, ‘England’ and then I put up here ‘China’. And on this side [left hand column] I put money, health, politics, transport, all these things. [And I asked] ‘what do you think the differences are in England and China?’ Well, money, the currency’s different; there’s the pound and the yuan. But ‘do you think people have more money in England, or do you think they’re poorer?’ … And they think people have more money in England and, yeah, I agree, people are much richer [in England]. … And politics? ‘What’s the difference between politics in England and politics in China?’ ‘Well, you have one party in China and we have three parties in England’.


This ‘culture’ teaching activity assumes as its objective an explicit, though simplistic, knowledge about some aspects of one Western culture.

This is different from the views of other participants. Beth, for example, explained her purpose in teaching culture:

They have to learn strategies for figuring out what people mean. Because if you’re standing in a hotel in Shanghai and somebody from Zimbabwe speaks to you in English you have to know that what he says is not necessarily going have the exact same meaning for you that it does for him. … My hope is that [in my lessons] they’ve learned coping strategies for dealing with other cultures, because a lot of these students want to stay in Shanghai, want to work for international companies or they want to work at hotels, and so that’s something they realistically need out in the world, a way to interact in a foreign language with foreigners that probably aren’t going to


be American. So I hope that’s something they can take away, I would like to think that.


Beth takes a view of culture teaching as ‘meanings behind messages’, and she reports that she taught culture instead of English to all her ostensibly oral English classes in 2008–2009. This was because she felt she was more effective teaching culture than English, an issue I return to in Chapter 11.

The inclusion of cultural content, in whatever form, appears to be at least part of why the foreign teachers are employed at PSU, and it seems to have been well received. So there is some awareness that culture teaching is important, and both Ollie and Beth address this by providing content knowledge mainly about Western culture/s, with an extension into comparative discussions and intercultural skills acquisition in Beth’s lessons.

Another, less obvious, form of ‘culture teaching’ was the teaching of Western-associated attributes such as self-confidence; most of the teachers mentioned the goal of enhancing students’ willingness to venture contributions in class without necessarily knowing the ‘correct’ answer. As discussed in Chapter 2, the sharing of students’ views and half-considered answers in class is not common in Chinese education, which is underpinned by a positivistic epistemology and deference to teachers and textbooks. The foreign teachers attributed students’ in-class reticence to a lack of confidence, though, and Ryan, among others, described and evidenced efforts to encourage students to contribute more:

It’s much easier for them to say, ‘I agree with him’, as opposed to ‘no, I don’t agree with that because of this, this, and this.’ … It could be that they don’t agree, but [at] their language level they don’t have the confidence, so it’s like, ‘yeah, I agree’.


This may explain Ryan’s delight, expressed in Chapter 5, that students were ‘at each other’s throats’ in a debate, as it may be evidence of increased confidence and of them becoming more ‘Western’ in their interactions. A parallel curriculum of learning ‘Western’ classroom norms and pragmatics is, then, another take on culture teaching.

Teaching culture: Exploring Chinese culture

But Ryan’s approach to teaching culture focuses on Chinese cultural artefacts and their underlying messages and details. Another difference is that Ryan sometimes uses Chinese to do this, which he rationalizes as scaffolding for the lower language-level students, although he says he also enjoys the chance to use Chinese as his own learning is his stated purpose for being in China. Ryan attributes culture discussions mainly to his own interests, about which he says he sometimes feels guilty. In some of his observed lessons, Ryan used a


discussions-based approach, in which he introduced a topic (often loosely related to the New Interchange unit for the week) and conducted a whole-class discussion on it. These were among the most engaging lessons I observed, with real communication taking place and longer, more complex utterances being produced by more students than contributed in most of the other lessons.

During the discussions, Ryan often touched on somewhat taboo topics, such as press censorship and the removal of migrant workers from Beijing ahead of the Olympics. To motivate students to participate, he asked a lot of informed and specific, but open, culture-based questions to stimulate the discussion, mostly in English, of quite complex, often political, topics. This relied on his knowledge about China. Ryan usually conducted the discussions from a position of sitting on a front-row desk rather than standing behind the classroom lectern, often putting himself in the position of learning about China from the students.

Thus Ryan took a ‘knowing about’ approach to culture, with a focus on students’ own cultures rather than notional target-language culture/s. He did not specifically aim to develop students’ intercultural competence, although his use of Socratic-dialectic questioning and his encouragement of argument- based discourse are implicitly Western, and so students arguably experienced something of ‘Western culture’ through their involvement in the discussions.

Ryan also positioned himself as students’ equal through his role and positioning in class, through flirting with his students, and by performing as a ‘cute’ foreigner: exposing his own ostensible areas of ignorance and asking the students to tell him more about China. He also showed that he valued the knowledge the students brought to class. Ryan scored highly on students’ evaluations, and his approach to ‘teaching culture’ may, in part, explain why.

As a result, ‘culture teaching’ varies widely, from Ollie’s reductionist ‘facts’ about Chinese poverty and English wealth, to Beth’s input and discussion of Western cultural artefacts, to Ryan’s discussions about China. Not all these approaches were equally successful at PSU in the form they were conducted, and further research into the teaching of culture is necessary to determine quite what is understood by ‘teaching culture’ and whether any of these approaches are suitable. This is revisited in Chapter 12.

The foreign teachers’ role: A clearing in the woods

As discussed, the foreign teacher role may not be solely, or even mainly, about language teaching, and Leo confirms that the role is not well defined:

The school [university] never really defined what exactly teaching [oral] English is, and what kind of English we need to teach. … It’s like, maybe we’re not even supposed to be teaching English, it’s just not clear. … There is no clear objective.



The largely unstated, but existent, expectations might explain the popularity of some ‘backpacker teachers’ who, perhaps unwittingly, correspond to Chinese notions of prototypical Westernness and who perform the implicit role of foreign teacher that is ‘firmly fixed but ill-defined’ (Phil ‘e-mail’ 21/01/2009). This section discusses a possible purpose of employing foreign teachers: as a foil to students’, and perhaps also Chinese teachers’, identity constructions. This would necessitate the construction and reification of a distinct foreign Other through the positioning of and expectations about foreign teachers.

However, the role of the foreign teacher is not unitary. Instead, I conceive the role of PSU foreign teacher as a clearing in the woods within which individuals can take different positions, rather than a single role/identity. Thus several PSU teachers have found ways in which they can successfully negotiate roles that both fit their own identity, and are also acceptable to their PSU students.

Beth explains her perception that actual English teaching aimed at language development, is firmly outside of the clearing in the woods; it does not form part of the acceptable role of a foreign teacher. She says:

We have to go in there and be cute, eat out of their hands, and then go in to the next group. … It just wears you down every day. … You’re treated as not just interchangeable but completely disposable, and so it’s no wonder that people like me, like Dan, like Karen, just wear down until all you end up with is people who teach like Todd, who doesn’t teach, he just plays games. … And he talks about teaching here [in a way that makes it clear] that he just doesn’t care at all.


The ‘wearing down’ process is something Beth returned to, responding to Phil’s quote that the role definition is ‘firmly fixed but ill defined’:

It’s kind of like growing up where you push your parents to find the limits, like, I can push it this way, I can’t push it that way. And then you accept the role as it is and you stay right within that framework, Jon [a British teacher, cited in Chapter 9] went to the extreme of, ‘OK, just games it is then’, or you try to manoeuvre it and push at some of those ill-defined edges and see if ‘OK, if I can do this, can I do this?’


Karen describes the same issue, of trying out different positions both within and outside the ‘clearing in the woods’, and realising that some roles were more acceptable than others:

I decided [this semester] that I was actually going to try and teach them something, mainly for my own sanity. And so I tried to do that in the beginning [of this semester], but then straightaway I felt that they didn’t like me as much as the teacher before [the classes change teachers after the first


semester]. … I lost that sort of friendship that I had in the first semester with them. … They weren’t taking me wanting to be a proper teacher well. … This semester I guess I just felt too tired for it. Like, the thought of having to be all bubbly, every lesson. … But because I was trying to be a good teacher I couldn’t actually take it back to just being, you know, entertaining. And then when I got my feedbacks … [they] were a lot lower than they were last semester even though I’d probably taught them more this semester.


Teachers’ feelings of disinvestment with their work at PSU are explored in Chapter 11. Salient here, however, is the process of finding the clearing in the woods, which Beth and Karen describe as a gradual wearing down until the foreign teachers’ practice corresponds with a role that students are willing to accept. Students’ primary tool in this process is unresponsiveness in lessons, but students may also complain about teachers they dislike, and/or express their views in teacher evaluations. As mentioned before, these are the only marker of teacher quality at PSU, and are the basis of teachers’ bonuses. So most teachers eventually bend to students’ constructions of foreign teachers.

Ryan’s story: The ideal foreign teacher?

Within this paradigm, Ryan scores very highly on students’ evaluations, and he can be said to be one of the most successful oral English teachers at PSU, if not necessarily the most effective. While there may be some overlap between these constructs, they are distinct. Beth explains:

[The student evaluations] they are a complete popularity contest, it’s how much do the students like you. … [They like] Ryan, because he’s young, cute, he’s funny, he tells funny stories. … It’s just his whole, kind of, foreigner package that will always put his popularity up. … He’s their age, um, he’s, you know, he can flirt, be funny, and still make them talk. … [The students] don’t like Dan, no, because he tries to teach language. [And] he doesn’t have that easy, fun, manner that the students want. They see him as rather intimidating, because he’s a proper teacher. … Ryan, he’s the ideal teacher here. ... But Ryan is an odd situation because you have someone who’s really interested in Chinese culture, that speaks Chinese, but he’s still young, and funny, and cute, and you’re not going to find all that many people like that.


Thus, although Ryan says he does not care about teaching, his lessons are perhaps the most truly ‘communicative’ of the oral English lessons at PSU because he is interested in Chinese culture and knows the questions to ask to have students discuss cultural issues in class with him. Without realizing it, Ryan may be delivering exactly the curriculum implicitly intended by the PSU contextual


constraints: cross-cultural contact with a Chinese-speaking, culturally sensitive foreign Other who is interested in, respectful of, and knowledgeable about China. In addition he is young, male, White, blond, sociable, and attractive, and perhaps conforms to the (mainly female) PSU students’ sense of a ‘typical’ (that is, idealized) Westerner, given their ‘evidence’ of Western foreigners from American films and TV series.

It is important to ask what type of capital it is that Ryan, and others like him, bring to teaching in China; why might his attributes be valued more highly than those of, for example, ELT expertise? Certainly, there is an enormous classroom value to Ryan’s cultural knowledge and his ability to engender a classroom atmosphere in which communication might take place among often-reticent students. It is also doubtful whether foreign teachers are useful as a source of language clarification and input, given students’ many years’ experience of learning English without having had much opportunity to practise it.

But Ryan offers an additional capital, that of allowing Chinese students to feel good about being Chinese. Ryan has spent years studying Chinese language and culture(s), and he can be constructed as a foreigner who submits to China by giving its language and culture the respect that every country may feel it deserves. This is particularly salient for China, given its victim/victor nationalism discourse (Li 2008), discussed in Chapter 3.

I put this suggestion to Ryan, who agreed that China’s ‘victor’ narrative may frame the way he is constructed in class:

My speaking Chinese can be seen as submission [to China]. … I have no professional goals as a teacher so I’m willing to sacrifice my identity as a teacher to fit the mould of what they want … because I’m more interested in China than in teaching [English].


Beth suggests that Ryan’s proficiency in Chinese provides a platform for students to build rapport with him. It may also allow students to feel that Ryan understands their struggles to learn a language:

BETH: [Ryan’s] a cute, foreign guy, and he’s their age … he can flirt, be funny, and still make them talk. And he speaks Chinese.

PHIONA: Does he use Chinese in class?BETH: Sometimes.PHIONA: And they enjoy that?BETH: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because it’s their chance to tell him, oh, his

Chinese is rubbish. And they’ll say, ‘oh, your Chinese is so bad’. PHIONA: But it isn’t. It’s way better than their English.BETH: No, but they can tell him that, and it gives them something better

than him. That they can say, ‘well, our English may be bad, but your Chinese is bad’.



Ryan’s knowledge of and interest in China may therefore be constructed by students as a validation of Chineseness. Ryan also suggests that the very presence of foreign teachers, and even the need for English language teaching, can be constructed as evidence of Chinese cultural superiority:

They use a White person to show it’s an English class. … It’s like, ‘foreigners don’t speak Chinese’, right? … When I say, ‘ni hao’ [hello] to someone and they’re like, ‘wow, your Chinese is so good’. They’re very arrogant about their language, it’s almost like, ‘you can say one, two words of Chinese and you’re a foreigner? That’s amazing.’ … [They think] Chinese is way too hard for foreigners to be able to speak, that’s why they’ve got to go and learn English.


The construction of foreign teachers as different from, and inferior to, Chinese people may be a mechanism for the affirmation of Chinese self-esteem. It may also be that the Chinese co-teachers, many of whom appeared to be self-conscious about their own level of communicative competence in English, construct the foreign teachers as fun but ineffective as it is professionally safer to do so; this was exemplified by Hua in Chapter 7. Of course, many of the activities that the foreign teachers are pushed into undertaking in class are, in fact, fun but ineffective. This adds evidence to this construction, particularly when viewed from a Chinese culture of learning in which communication-focused activities may appear insubstantive.

Infantilizing Chinese students

The discursive construction of the role of foreign teacher as a foreign entertainer is dangerous, though, as it may create and entrench negative stereotyping more generally, on both sides. While students seem to construct foreign Others as less accomplished and less serious than the Chinese, the participant teachers may also construct the students as children and the Chinese education system as inferior.

The foreign teachers construct the students as Others mainly by infantilizing them, for instance by referring to them as ‘kids’. This is common practice among the teachers at teachers’ meetings and in their conversations outside class. In addition, some teachers used very childish games/activities in class, justifying them as age-appropriate for their students, most of whom are in their early 20s. One example was Harry’s drawing activity, explained at a teachers’ meeting, for which he had asked his students to bring colouring crayons to class; Harry was the PSU oral English senior teacher in 2007. Another example of an activity, also suggested at a Wednesday meeting, was to have the students act out a dating agency role-play and have them explain to the teacher, playing the role of their ‘father’, why the partner they had chosen was appropriate. Infantilization also occurred in the classroom observations: Ryan repeatedly asked his students what


colour of chalk they would like him to use and Ollie and Leo used teacher and students’ drawings on the board to elicit laughter from the other students.

Beth attributes some foreign teachers’ use of the word ‘kids’ to refer to their students to teachers’ own struggles with their role and professional identity:

It really jars, especially for the teachers who are, like, 24. I’m like, ‘you’re two years older than they are’. It’s a very diminutive way to refer to them … In some ways I think it’s a method of distancing yourself from them because you are very close in age to them, that you distance yourself by calling them ‘kids’. It’s a way of, you know, establishing, re-establishing your status. … It could be a way to, for you to, kind of, reaffirm your own position, that you’re the one with power, … because you’re feeling that you need that power or that you don’t have that power.


The Old China Hands give a different explanation for the construction of Chinese students as ‘kids’, citing their perception of Chinese students’ immaturity compared to behavioural norms of young Western adults:

VAL: I don’t find that strange at all. [Chinese university students] they’re so immature. University students here, you can take five years off them mentally, not intellectually, but emotionally and culturally, because the culture is like that … they’re not allowed to be independent.

NEIL: We all started part-time jobs at 15. They don’t; they’re children. They sit around watching TV, playing video games.

VAL: They’re 22, whatever, and they’re like children. They’re walking around with these Hello Kitty t-shirts [Hello Kitty is a Japanese cartoon character]. They are emotionally much, much younger.

URSULA: Boys on one side [of the classroom], girls on the other.GREG: Yeah, Chinese students are not very worldly.VAL: [In Western cultures] we travel [as young adults], these people, no,

they’ve never been out of the courtyard [Chinese apartment blocks often have a courtyard in which children play].

(‘Old China Hands’ focus group 08/09/2007)

But perhaps Val is interpreting students’ behaviours through a lens of what these might mean in her own culture. For Val, wearing Hello Kitty, watching TV, and not having travelled might signal childishness; in China, the meanings and norms associated with such signifiers may be different. Claire gives another example of a potential misreading of students’ outward behaviour:

They speak a lot of Chinese [in class] and I think it’s only to be expected, because they’re at that sort of age, aren’t they, where they don’t want to seem like they’re speaking English all the time and be showing off to their friends.



Ryan gives another misinterpretation-of-symbols explanation, this time language related: ‘of course Harry gets them to bring crayons and he thinks they’re kids. Harry’s Chinese is crap. When you don’t speak Chinese it’s easy to think they’re stupid. You can’t see the complexity in what they say’ (Ryan ‘interview’ 02/10/2007).

The PSU teachers’ construction of the students as kids may also lead them to reduce Chinese university education. Sam, a PSU teacher in 2008–2009, compares his own university experience with his perception of PSU:

Teaching here I got lazy, thought of games to play because that is what our children (oh sorry, students!) want to do. … When I was at university we would discuss topics such as abortion and have big debates about the ethics of it. Over here, we have to think of a game to play with every topic. It is like being a children’s entertainer/clown. … And I personally feel that after 10–12 years of learning English most of my students should be ashamed of their level of English. I went to France for a year [as part of my university degree] and I passed 15 exams and wrote a 8000 word thesis in French. In China we play games!? What is that about?

(Sam ‘e-mail’ 26/06/2009)

Sam’s point of view is perhaps understandable, given that the students he teaches push for ‘fun’, and that they appear to construct the role of foreign teachers as entertainers. Beth also described her view of the PSU students: ‘we would consider them less emotionally mature for their age than American students; all they want is recess’ (‘interview’ 09/06/2009). Karen described how she had formed a similar opinion of her ‘childish’ students:

[A friend] teaches little kids … and he’ll tell me about the lessons that he did … and I thought ‘oh, that sounds funny, I’ll try that with my class’. And it was so childish, it was literally every time I showed them a card with the word in Chinese they had to throw a ball at the correct word in English. Childish, yeah? They loved it. And every lesson they just want to play stupid, pointless games like that. … It makes me think less of the students.


Of course, we might ask why Karen chose to use such a ‘childish’ activity in the first place, and she goes on to explain her struggle to know what else to do in lessons, in which she feels under pressure to be ‘fun’.

It also makes me think less of myself, because it makes me think ‘what am I doing here?’ … But it passes the time and that’s all I think about, is getting through those hours. What we’re doing is pointless. … It’s a joke, English teaching is a joke.



Child-like assumptions about the students are being made by most of the teachers. However, some students are behaving in child-like ways, perhaps as they perceive that the foreign teachers expect this ‘fun’ behaviour, as the foreign teachers are themselves constructed as ‘fun’.

Conclusion

This chapter has explored the possibility that oral English teaching at PSU is not about English teaching at all. It is my contention that there is a hidden curriculum and that this dictates the conceptual space within which the foreign teachers are allowed to operate. This may not be intentional, but it is an unstated construction of the type of ‘foreignness’ that is allowed and valued in the context. It is not mainly about English language teaching.

Instead, the hidden curriculum for students appears to be primarily one of contact with representatives of Chinese constructions of ‘the West’, and with attributes deemed ‘Western’ such as personal confidence and expressing opinions. Ryan’s case is explored as indicative of this possibility as he consistently received very positive feedback from his students but would be considered ineffective against almost any measure of English language teacher competence (e.g. Pasternak and Bailey 2004). It is therefore suggested that Ryan’s practice represents the implicit curriculum, and his case has been studied with the intention of understanding this hidden construct.

Of course, it is epistemologically problematic to infer purpose from practice. Instead of there being ulterior motives lurking under the surface, the constraints and challenges described thus far may simply be the nature of working in a cross-cultural context, with an under-qualified Director of Studies hired by a profit-making recruitment company, at an under-funded second-tier university in a rapidly developing country. This, of course, takes place within the globalized world economy in which individuals may seek to acquire transnational capital, whether by teaching in China for a while or by making ‘foreign friends’ with their Western English teachers. However, a hidden curriculum does appear to be operating at PSU. In this, the students’ learning outcomes are different from the ostensible outcomes intended.

Similarly, for teachers, motivations for ‘teaching English’ at PSU may in fact be primarily the opportunity to acquire capital such as ‘China experience’ including language skills and all-important guanxi (connections), the cachet of transnationalism, or life experience more broadly. However, if this is the case, a number of further questions are raised about the nature of the intercultural contact that is taking place in this setting. The negative Othering of the Chinese students, teachers, and institutions in which some foreign teachers indulge raises the question of whether bridges, or barriers, are being built between Western and Chinese cultures in the PSU context. This is revisited in Chapter 11.

However, not all the foreign teachers experience PSU the same way. As discussed in Chapter 3, they bring themselves, and their habitus, with them, and these pre-existing identities affect the sensemaking they undertake in the context.


This may explain why Karen or Harry, for example, infantilize their students while Beth and Ryan are more critical of this practice. Another factor affecting teachers’ experiences in the context is gender, and the next chapter discusses teachers’ gendered identities both as PSU teachers and as transnationals in Shanghai.

9 Gendered identities

The participant teachers make sense of their experiences at PSU differently. These differences appear to stem largely from habitus, the motivations the participants bring to the experience, and the extent to which their ‘capital’ matches that which is implicitly asked of foreign teachers. This is to say that differences in teachers’ sensemaking can be attributed more to the people rather than differences in their experiences. However, there are some differences in the experiences of men and women transnationals at PSU and in Shanghai more widely, and this chapter considers the impact of gender in participants’ experiences of the context.

As discussed in Chapter 3, an über-masculinity may be attributed to the identities of Western men in East Asia. This is discussed in this chapter and theorized as a product of Occidentalism. This phenomenon impacts both men and women participants in the present study and it affects individuals differently. Experiential differences may result from varying types and amounts of capital attributed in the context, but also to individuals’ performances and the extent to which these correspond to socially constructed role expectations and/or to participants’ own values. The participants’ stories and those of many of the informants are told in this chapter as illustrative of these ideas.

Becoming superheroes? Constructing Western men

This section examines the phenomenon mentioned in Chapter 3, of the elevated sexual appeal and status of Western men in East Asia. The focus of this section is not the causes of this phenomenon, as this would entail different research among Chinese women. However, it is useful to begin with an examination of the participants’ perceptions of Chinese women’s motives, as this provides an insight into the sensemaking the Western teachers undertake.

The stereotype of foreigners as hedonistic, ‘fun’, and ‘open’ would explain one motive ascribed to Chinese women; that of utilizing a sexual relationship with a Western Other as a way to experience a lifestyle that might otherwise be out of bounds to young Chinese women. Three PSU teachers discussed this motivation:

JON: I think [Chinese women] want to try a lot of new things out that they couldn’t ever do with a Chinese guy.

Gendered identities 169

TODD: To experiment, not necessarily to be that person but to see what it would be like.

SAM: Being with us is a big cultural difference and I think it’s something that they all want to know about. Sex is part of it, but they want to come round your house and see the bong [i.e. water pipe for smoking marijuana] or whatever. …

TODD: I think a lot of them are just curious, and they’d like to spend time with you strictly to spend time with you. … But there are also some that would love nothing more than to jump your bones [have sex with you].

JON: They know their mates won’t find out about it or anything, so they kind of do what really they want to do.

(‘Western Men’ focus group 13/06/2009)

Stereotyping about Westerners may go beyond the mystique of the foreign Other, with Western men assumed to be gentlemanly, sexually accomplished, free of Chinese concerns and positioning of social class/province of origin, wealthy, and as providing an opportunity for international travel and residence (‘PSU students’ focus group’ 12/06/2009). Guo, a male student, commented:

We are one-point-three billion Chinese and foreigners here are just few … so maybe people try to make friends with [a foreigner in China]. He can be someone different here. Maybe nobody pay attention to him at home but when he come here everybody say, ‘oh, big person’. … I think a lot of Chinese girls, they see the TV shows and they have the definition, the US man, they are tall, handsome, very gentleman … And though the man is maybe short, not handsome, they will have the stereotype. They will think he is gentleman. … Frankly speaking, I feel a little jealous.

(Guo ‘PSU Students’ focus group 12/06/2009)

So Western men are constructed as desirable among some Chinese women in Shanghai, and this seems to drive the ‘superhero’ phenomenon. By this, I mean the context-dependent display of extraordinary ‘superpowers’ by individuals who are otherwise ordinary; this is the premise of ‘superhero’ narratives such as Superman. Beth explained her perception:

Having a Western boyfriend, it’s a status symbol. You’ve got this White guy, presumably he has money … they’re seen as being racier, more adventurous, or as all the students say, ‘more open’ ... meaning that they’ll have sex. Meaning that traditional Chinese men would not. … So for some of these young city girls … they’ve got a job, they’re just out of university and maybe they don’t have much money, so if you get a waiguoren [foreigner] as a boyfriend he’ll have a good job. … It’s often constructed as Western men coming out here and exploiting these poor naïve girls and it’s completely not that. I know that happens, but that’s not always it. And the ones I am familiar with, that’s completely not what it is.



As discussed in Chapter 3, this construction of Western men as ‘racier’ can be attributed to stereotyping based on exonormative, imagined Western masculinity, borne of Hollywood and other media (Louie 2002). This was mentioned by several participants and often framed as an attack on Chinese masculinity and/or on Chinese women’s ostensible sexual passivity. As Leo commented in Chapter 7, foreigners may be constructed in China as ‘open, [which] means “will have sex anytime, anywhere, with anyone”’. Four Western men discussed this issue:

ALAN: I don’t know if it’s the same as back home, like, the Black guy stereotype. I don’t know how they, whether they see us as, like, White guy, massive cock.

JON: Yeah, they do. … Another thing [is that] they’re always going to think you’re great at sex. … Most Chinese men are … little and skinny, and no, sort of, coordination or anything, no style.

ALAN: They don’t know how to talk to girls.SAM: They never seem to give compliments. …TODD: That’s another reason why the girls really like Western men, we give

compliments, we’re open about that. … We’re simple, honest, sincerely nice to them. And I’ve heard that that’s not something they’d normally get [from Chinese men].

SAM: To a certain extent, China’s developing and still very traditional. Sometimes when I’m comparing China to back home I, kind of, look back into the 1940s, or, like, Victorian times, when you were forced to marry a rich man. When sex was a quick wriggle and then there was a baby … like sex wasn’t talked about.

JON: Chinese girls, they’d probably do whatever you told them.TODD: If you said ‘do this’, OK, ‘do that’ OK.ALAN: But they’re probably not going to do anything proactive because

Chinese men wouldn’t like it. But they’ll let you do anything.TODD: If you just jumped on missionary and rocked it that way, they

wouldn’t say, ‘OK, I’m going to flip over’.(‘Western Men’ focus group 13/06/2009)

Exonormative, Occidentalist constructions of masculinity work in Western men’s favour as they may be considered desirable by some Chinese women.

There are doubtless some positive influences of the ‘superhero’ phenomenon, and these were frequently articulated in interviews. Todd and Ryan explain:

It certainly is empowering to come over here and be the centre of attention. … You can pretty much get what you want, do what you want, live the lifestyle, live as a celebrity; you’re like a rock star.

(Todd ‘Western Men’ focus group 2009)

I was pretty dorky back in Canada, not very smooth or anything like that. … But then when I came out here, yeah, maybe it does give you a confidence


that you were lacking back home. Certainly I think that’s what it did for me. … I’d like to say [my time in China has made me] more humble but I don’t think so. I think the opposite is truer.


Ryan’s and Todd’s are testimonies to some positive influences of the ‘superhero’ experience for the men themselves. However, they are borne of a power imbalance between Western men and Chinese women, and the consequent demand among the latter for the former.

Comparing Chinese and Western women, Ryan shows this power imbalance:

In the West we have a complete rejection of femininity in favour of masculinity. … I’m taking this as the yin and the yang, right? The yin is femininity and the yang is masculinity … so, like femininity is usually the submissive, the quiet, the subtle; the element is water … it fits into wherever you put it. … With Western feminism … we highlight the yang, right, the masculine role. No woman wants to be called submissive … They should be out, having a job, like the men. They need to be CEOs of companies. … But the only reason we find that valuable is because we value that masculinity. And we value it so much that we completely ignore the feminine role … [in China] A lot of the girls … they’ll say, ‘I want to raise good children and be a good housewife’. … They value that role and it’s perfectly respectable to do it. … Essentially what we have in the West, it’s not feminism, it’s masculinism. Feminism is … you worship the feminine. … So an Asian girl that’s just wanting to please and wanting to bring up a family, that’s perfect for me. They’re so easy to get along with. … Chinese women are very honest about it, they just kind of throw themselves at you … and expect you to eventually turn yourself around, to stay here and commit to them.


Ryan’s critique is perhaps persuasive, particularly given its emic framing in Chinese cultural terms, and he constructs the role of Chinese women as different-but-equal to the role of Chinese men. Ryan’s Taoist, yin-yang framework runs deep in Chinese culture (Louie 2002). However, it does not ring particularly true in modern Shanghai, whose women inhabitants are notoriously strong, feisty, and dominant of men, at least in the private sphere (Farrer 2002). While Ryan’s assertion is doubtless based in his own and his peers’ experiences, Chinese women in these encounters may choose to make themselves powerless in their pursuit of Western men at any cost, as Western men are highly valued commodities (Farrer 2002). This is not femininity, still less feminism, but the interplay of neo-colonial power relations. Ryan’s critique can, then, best be described as an Orientalism in Taoist clothing. The powerlessness of Chinese women in relationships with Western men is a postcolonial inequality in which Western men are perceived as desirable because


they are Western men. Thus, rather than ‘worshipping’ femininity, Ryan’s critique of Western feminism actually reduces and essentializes Chinese women. This is one cost of the confidence boost experienced by men who become ‘superheroes’ in Shanghai.

However, most of the men in this study did perceive increased self-confidence, social empowerment, and external validation of social and sexual success, and these can be said to be positive outcomes for the individuals involved. These are discussed next.

Transactional relationships and identity tensions

As discussed, Chinese women’s pursuit of Western men may be about Western men as a category rather than necessarily about the individual. This issue led some of the teachers to feel objectified:

DAN: We’re just walking ATMs.SAM: She is just out to get whatever she can, whether it’s a 20-kuai [USD$3]

cab fare or if she doesn’t have to pay for a beer in a bar. … For some Chinese women I think any Western man would do.

DAN: … It’s like we’re interchangeable.(‘Western Men’ focus group 13/06/2009)

I ended up buying everything for them [Chinese women] whilst we were out, so I stopped bothering. It felt like I had to pay for the pleasure of their company … [and I thought] ‘bollocks to that’. I don’t pay anyone any money for the pleasure of being with them.

(Sam ‘e-mail’ 26/06/2009)

While Sam and Dan felt they were being used by the Chinese women with whom they had formed relationships, other Western men either rejected the notion that they were being objectified, or denied that it was problematic:

PHIONA: [In response to Sam and Dan’s comments above] So, are men being objectified?

TODD: [laughs] No. Maybe. Cool with me. …JON: It’s OK with me. … It sounds kind of bad, but you can take advantage

of the fact that they love White men so much … I would like to tell myself it’s not just the colour of my skin, but it probably is. … I don’t know why they love us but they do, it’s great. … I’m quite young [23] so I just want to have fun.


Having said that he felt objectified but that this was unproblematic for him, Jon described how expectations about Western men affected the reality of his relationships with Chinese women. Here, he and Alan negotiate the issue:


ALAN: They have this image of us … as gentlemen, so we have to change [i.e. play the role of being gentlemen]. If we were our normal selves the girls would probably be offended or upset. …

JON: Yeah, you have to pretend you’re a lot nicer than you are, you don’t talk about the one-night stands you’ve had. … [On a date in Britain] you’d make, like, crude jokes. You could say something about her tits or whatever and she wouldn’t be bothered. If you said that to a Chinese girl they’d be like, ‘eh?’… yeah, horrified.


The extent to which objectification is felt to be problematic may depend on the individual’s purpose. Jon says that he just ‘wants to have fun’, and that, as a result, he is not concerned about being objectified or if he cannot be himself in a relationship. Beth describes encounters between Western men motivated by ‘having fun’ and Chinese women motivated by ‘experimenting’ as a ‘culture of mutual exploitation’ and I am inclined to agree. But not all men feel comfortable about possible objectification or the role constructed by perceptions about Western men as a category. This points to an important issue, that the ‘superhero’ phenomenon affects individuals differently.

Western men may also be judged as a category by Western women, who may assume that relationships between Western men and Chinese women are necessarily the product of a power imbalance. Beth exemplifies this, describing Ollie’s relationship with his former PSU student:

Ollie has absolutely fallen into the old man stereotype here … the failure at home, the loser … he couldn’t make it in England and he’s running away. … He comes out here and he doesn’t make a lot of money but he has a job with at least some status, and Western guys still have enough cachet … even if their jobs aren’t great. He’s a generally nice, if creepy, person and I’m sure is willing to spend the money that he does have on this girl to try to make her like him because he’s desperately insecure and she validates him, having this young, beautiful Chinese girl with him is incredibly validating … Here he has this young, compared to him, girl, who seems to just adore him. … What he wants is that public validation, that ‘see?’ His life does have meaning, it does have value because he does have this person who appreciates him and who values him, and he has this job so he is successful. … He has all the visible trappings of success so that must mean he’s successful.


Whether or not a power imbalance is in fact responsible for Ollie’s relationship with his former student is not within the scope of this research. However, what is important to note is Beth’s attribution of this explanation to Ollie’s situation, and her categorization of Western men in such relationships as ‘losers’.

A second potential negative consequence of the ‘superhero’ effect is exemplified by Alan’s story, which is of tensions between his appropriated personal identity


and the identity that is often attributed to Western men in Shanghai. Alan is a PSU teacher that I interviewed in 2009. Beth begins his story:

When Alan first got out here he tried the drinking and whoring route but it just doesn’t work for him … he’s just not that guy, he tried to be that guy … he has a girlfriend now … and the first night that he went out with her … he became completely smitten with her and totally fell for her. … He fell in with Todd and the others in his first semester here … and he just became a jerk. … And then he settled down, started studying Chinese, and started finding some value in his life here.


Alan tells his own story:

I can’t lie to a girl. If a girl’s, like, too innocent I’m not going to go for it [i.e. have sex with her], I’ll just leave her alone. … It’s too much effort to get with Chinese girls, you have to go out on lots of dates and put in lots of groundwork … you might find one who’s probably a virgin, she’s never had a boyfriend before ... You do get the odd slut, but it’s too much effort. … If you go out on a date … you’ll struggle to take her back to your house and have sex. … It’s not easy [for sex to be purely casual]. No, it’s not. … It’s much easier to just get laid in England. … I’m still really enjoying China, I just don’t go out and nail a lot of birds.

(Alan ‘Western Men’ focus group 13/06/2009)

Alan’s discourse is complex. On the one hand, he resists the insincerity of the ‘groundwork’ required to have casual sex with Chinese women and says he feels uncomfortable about deceiving those who are ‘too innocent’. On the other hand, Alan’s discourse is framed in terms of ‘nailing birds’ and describing women who have casual sex as ‘sluts’, and he presents his unwillingness to occupy the Western-man-in Shanghai role as ‘too much effort’ rather than as morally wrong. Alan’s comments were recorded in a focus group in front of Todd, Jon, Sam, and Dan, and it is possible that this complexity is due to peer pressure. Alan is both ‘one of the boys’ and not ‘of the boys’, and his discourse represents a skilful navigation between his personal identity and the identity he enacts in order to be accepted among his peers. On a subsequent e-mail, Alan confirmed that ‘the bastard role’ made him ‘feel uncomfortable’ (Alan ‘e-mail’ 10/07/2009).

Thus Alan appears to be negotiating the difference between his appropriated identity and the relational identity attributed to, and enacted by some, young Western men in Shanghai. But other Western men may be less able to compartmentalize and manage their appropriated and attributed identities, and may, as a result, feel they are taking on an identity with which they are uncomfortable. One such case is Ryan, who comments:


I’ve become a bit of a prick, really. I think it’s to do with the way people treat you here, like, I think people treat me too nicely, and you get away with too much. Like my girlfriend, beautiful girl, she’ll do anything for me and it doesn’t matter how I treat her she’ll still completely, you know, give me all the power. … [Ryan describes having casual sex with other women, including sex workers]. [My girlfriend] just says, ‘do anything you want just don’t tell me about it’ … it’s just, like, ‘marry me’.


Ryan’s point is echoed by Jon, who describes himself as having become ‘a bit dirty’ (Jon ‘e-mail’ 18/07/2009) as a result of increased sexual opportunities and tolerance for Western men’s ‘bad’ behaviour in Shanghai.

Western men may thus experience a metamorphosis. Will, who recruits and manages foreign teachers across many different contexts in China, describes the problem as it can affect Western men:

[Foreign] males get a lot of attention from [Chinese] females; I mean it’s quite obvious. … It’s actually quite overwhelming when you first get here because it isn’t actually about you yourself it’s just a kind of token thing but you do get a lot of attention. A lot of males maybe turn into pop stars a little bit, you know this kind of pop-star ego phenomenon, which is a shame because they start to believe it, so there’s a, sort of, danger there.


Leo also describes the process, framed by his understanding of how it occurs:

A lot of them here, the reason they act that way is because they can … Later, or privately, they might feel guilty but they’ve got themselves into this role that they can’t change. … They have been made into this colonial lord, which they probably don’t feel comfortable with but they look around and go, ‘everybody wants me to be this big, White, loud American so maybe I should’. … The conventional way [of looking at this] is laowai [foreigners] coming to China, exploiting, they’re racist, they look down on people, but it’s really a cop out way of looking at things, it really is. … If everyone around me tells me that I should act in a certain way … even though I might feel uncomfortable it’s like peer pressure. … Maybe inside they feel, ‘I’m acting like a jerk’. … This is why I move myself more and more towards my Chinese heritage because I want to get away from my Canadian [identity].


Ryan described this attitude, citing Todd’s example and describing the effect he perceives the PSU experience may be having on Todd himself:

Most of the foreigners who come out here they don’t have a clue … they really live in their own world. … They just go to the Blue Frog [an expatriate


bar] and hang out with their friends. … I’ve seen foreigners around here that have that attitude, you know, get pissed off with Chinese people because they can’t speak English, but then they can’t speak a word of Chinese. …If you look at Todd that’s pretty much what’s happening. … He’s the guy that came out here with plans to study Chinese but … a year turned into two years, turned into three years. … He hates everything around here, he’s big into hate, he hates Chinese people, this is what he’s told me. … I’m really curious about that, right, because it’s like, where does he think he’s coming from? … He’ll go back [to the USA] and basically say, ‘Chinese people are stupid, it’s all true’.


Moskowitz’s (2008: 330) description, cited in Chapter 3, of young Western men in Taipei ‘happily embracing the hedonistic identity that has been thrust upon them’ is partly right. While the socially constructed ‘Western-man-in-China’ role may or may not match men’s own appropriated identity it does appear to be attributed to them rather than chosen. But the extent to which individuals feel comfortable playing that role depends on the individual’s skill in negotiating the competing pressures of their pre-existing habitus and the pressure they encounter both from Chinese women and from their peers. Some, like Alan, seem able to achieve this balance through skilful discourse and finding a longer-term relationship. Others, like Jon, compartmentalize their attributed and appropriated identities. Some begin a relationship while continuing to ‘play the field’, leading to feelings of guilt over the ethics of their behaviour; this is the situation Ryan describes. Another tack, taken by Leo, is to resist the identity of Westernness and take refuge in another identity; Leo uses his Chinese identity. Still other men may find a closer match between their pre-existing habitus and the constructed ‘Western man’ role, and may enjoy the opportunity to behave in ways considered unacceptable at home.

Men behaving badly

Many of the men in this study described behaviours in which they engage in Shanghai but which may not be socially sanctioned in their home communities. These included paying for sex and having sexual relationships with their students. Karen described her perception of these behaviours as ways of forming group solidarity among Western men:

Every night is boys night, they want to find women … whereas in the West no-one would force you to go to a hooker, if anything they would mock you for going to a hooker. … [They do it] just because they can. … It’s a bonding thing for them. … For example, Todd or Ryan will say, ‘oh yeah, I’ve done this to a woman, and, what, you haven’t?’ and then it’s all a kind of man thing. … They talk about it in front of me and I feel disgusted, I walk away.



Todd, Ryan, Jon, and Alan confirmed that many of the Western men in their social group use sex workers in Shanghai although few had done so in their home countries.

Another ‘bad’ behaviour is the culture of objectifying and ‘banging’ students. While sexual relationships with students are ostensibly forbidden, almost all the teachers I interviewed raised the issue, and the practice is commonplace for some of the Western men at PSU and other Chinese educational contexts. While Ollie (among other, non-participant, male teachers) has formed a long-term relationship with a woman who was originally his student, there is also a culture among some of the younger Western men of objectifying their female students and other Chinese women, and of having casual sex with a series of women, including their students. Beth described the phenomenon:

They’ll be standing outside one of the classrooms and a student walks by and they’ll just start talking about either how gorgeous she is or what horrible things they want to do to her, or, conversely, how unattractive she is, how they would dare each other to have sex with her … You get this complete, kind of, callousness, treating these, the students, but also other young women … just as complete objects.


Todd exemplifies Western men’s objectification of Chinese women; here, he explains his seduction technique:

TODD: If you can pick one out of the herd, and separate them from the flock then it’s on; you can do whatever you want.

PHIONA: Flock? Herd? What does that mean?TODD: So there’s a herd of girls, a gaggle of girls. If you can separate one, so

that she knows that she’s separated and that nothing she does will get back to the rest of the herd, then you can pretty much do whatever you want, and she will pretty much do whatever.

PHIONA: Right. That sounds a bit like lions hunting a zebra, doesn’t it?TODD: It does. It’s kind of predator style, if you can get one of these girls

away from all of their friends, they can be very open. … And they’re still the traditional good girl.

(‘Western Men’ focus group, 13/06/2009)

Ryan also described the issue, citing Jon as an example:

[PSU] is just playboy mansion for Jon. And he’s just going around sleeping with as many students as he can, not really caring what they think or who they are. … He’s a young, cute guy, and he’s in a place with a whole bunch of hot girls that are the same sort of age as him, so he’s just goes and flirts to see where he can get.



Beth’s more nuanced description of an incident from Jon’s story highlights her perception of his agency as well as his outward behaviour:

Baishui was the first student that Jon went out with. … He was the first foreigner she’d ever talked to and he was cute and funny and he flirted with her. But she had this friend in her class, this guy Wei … and he [Wei] was desperately in love with her [Baishui]. … And the day Wei told Jon that he had this thing about Baishui, that was the day that Jon took her home [laughs]. And I was like, ‘oh, you’re a horrible person’ … and maybe, personally, Jon agonizes about this, but no, he just told it as a pub story. … He liked Wei and thought he was a great guy, but he was like, ‘you know, I wanted to bang Baishui’, so he did.


Ethically, it must be noted that Jon himself confirmed the details of these quotes, although he protested that ‘there have been a lot of guys worse than me’ (Jon, ‘Western Men’ focus group, 13/06/2009). Additionally, Jon is not the only teacher about whom this kind of story was told in the data. Here, his story is used to exemplify a wider phenomenon.

Ryan is part of that wider phenomenon, although it is Shanghai not PSU he seems to treat like a ‘playboy mansion’. While Ryan did not talk about sexual relationships with PSU students, he described many other ‘bad behaviours’ in which he engages, framing them within ‘feeling guilty’ and saying he behaves in ways he ‘shouldn’t’ (Ryan ‘interview’ 10/06/2009). These behaviours included paying for sex and having a series of one-night stands while ostensibly in a monogamous relationship. He explains:

My girlfriend puts pressure on me to marry her … she makes me feel guilty. … I’m still not ready to give up my single life, but the way I see it I don’t really have to. It’s not like if I don’t take this opportunity I’ll never have another opportunity to get married. It seems pretty easy for me, especially here, to get married. … I don’t feel ready for that right now but when that time comes I’m pretty sure it won’t be too hard. When that comes, really, I think what I’m going to want out of a wife is somebody who will be able to take care of the home.


Beth, who is Ryan’s closest PSU friend, explains her perception of Ryan’s validation rationale behind his use of sex workers and his one night stands:

Ryan is incredibly insecure. He doesn’t quite believe, well, he sort of knows, that the Chinese girls think he’s attractive … but I don’t think he honestly believes it. So, for him, going to hookers is a quick, easy way to get validation, I guess. I think he’s also fallen into the ‘Western guy in China trap’, which is, ‘you want sex? It’s easy, just go pay for it. If your girlfriend’s busy that night,


ah, no problem there’s somebody down the street that you can pay a couple of hundred kuai [USD$30] to and do anything with’. … The Ukrainian girl [with whom Ryan had had a one night stand a few days before Beth’s interview], that was all about validating himself. … It’s like, ‘see? I can still bang a White chick’.


From the participants’ sensemaking there is clearly an awareness that these behaviours would likely be considered ethically wrong in their home cultures. However the stronger pressure seems to come from the men’s peer group, perhaps because they are a long way from home, family, and old friends, and are conscious of the need to fit in socially among their peers. They are also in a foreign culture but in a role in which they are expected to portray outward confidence. It may be that engaging in ‘bad’ behaviours allows for this confidence to be performed even if it is not felt.

Some men in the study strongly condemned these behaviours as exploitative. Phil expressed his concern:

The guys that come to Asia and perceive that class, that room of females who are generally 21, 22 [years old], as sexual objects … and that happens a lot, there’s no protection for the students, there’s no safeguards. … I lose a lot of sleep over that, I really do.


However, Phil is ostensibly, although indirectly, responsible for managing the PSU teachers, and Dan explained his frustration with the management, particularly Leo at the departmental level, that allows this culture to flourish:

Some of the guys are mainly here to pick up Chinese women, sometimes from their own class … I wish they [Leo, Phil, PSU?] were more punitive. … They say, ‘do not sleep with the students, we’re serious about this’, and everyone goes, ‘bullshit’. … [The teachers] can get away with murder and some of them make a point of seeing how much murder they can get away with.


Sam and Leo made similar comments about their discomfort with the culture of ‘banging students’, and expressed concern that they and other Western men may be tarred with the brush of those who behave ‘badly’.

Phil explained his understanding of the reasons behind the behaviours and attitudes of some Western men he has met teaching English in Shanghai:

Why the machismo? Maybe it’s a self-defence mechanism. They’re in a strange culture and maybe the only way that they can feel like they’re on some kind of emotional terra firma is by adopting this character that portrays


overt confidence that they don’t actually inside feel … or maybe not, maybe it’s it’s just a cumulative effect of having girls tell you that you’re good looking … they’ve never had that before and they’re not equipped to deal with it.


Karen also explored this issue, framing it as her responses to the behaviour of the Western men with whom she works and socializes:

I love these guys but they disgust me. … They bitch about each other and say these horrible things, and they know ethically what they’re doing is wrong. … Todd and Ryan and Jon and everyone, they always say, ‘oh yeah, he does this’, and bitch about it, and say how it was bad, ‘how can he do this?’ But to their face [of the person they’d discussed] they’d be like, ‘oh, [you’re a] legend’. And then they’d go out and do it themselves. … It’s like Shanghai is eating away at them. … It’s disgusting, it’s actually a competition now [to see who can sleep with the most students] and Jon is winning.


Depending on the extent to which Western men problematize their attributed identity, and the extent to which they live outside of their own values while they are in China, there may also be problems when these men return to their home societies. Karen commented on this, citing the experiences of Western men she knows who have returned to the UK and the USA.

For these guys, going back to the West, it’s like coming off a drug … [In Shanghai] they get attention all the time … [When they go home] they’re going from Superman to nothing.


Cultural re-entry was the subject of speculation for several of the participants in this study, but further research on returned expatriate teachers is necessary to understand the experiences as they occur in individuals’ lived realities.

‘A guy who happens to have breasts’: Western women

This section describes Western women’s experiences at PSU and in wider Shanghai. In contrast to the ‘superhero’ phenomenon experienced by Western men, this might be described as a ‘cloak of invisibility’. The ‘superhero’ phenomenon does not transfer to Western women, for whom Occidentalist stereotypes of wealth, sexual accomplishment, and social/international mobility do not seem to offer an equivalent symbolic capital among Chinese men. Instead, for Chinese men, these very traits may be threatening rather than appealing, as Leo explained:


It’s unusual for Chinese guys to be with Western women, really unusual. … Chinese men, they have to carry on family line; they have to look after their parents. … They might like White women but the pressure on them [from parents and society] is so great that they wouldn’t dare.


Ryan suggests a less flattering reason for Chinese men’s apparent preference for Chinese women:

You don’t see many couples like that [Western woman/Chinese man] … It’s the submissiveness of [Chinese] women here, and the urge of control of [Chinese] men here. Because women in the West also have this need for control and that conflicts with the men here.


It appears that Chinese masculinity, or at least as it is constructed among the participants, does not tend to draw Western women to Chinese men the way some Western men are attracted to Orientalist notions of Chinese femininity. This can be understood as an Orientalist emasculation of Chinese men through the ‘feminization of the Orient’ (Said 1979). While Shanghainese men have a reputation for being hen-pecked (Farrer 2002), the norms of Chinese masculinity demand that men at least appear to earn more than their wives and assume a protector role (Louie 2002). This would conflict with the perceived, and often real, superior earning power of Westerners in Shanghai, including the women teachers at PSU.

That said, I did encounter a few Western women in sexual relationships with Chinese men. But these relationships are greatly outnumbered by those between Western men and Chinese women. Farrer (2008) cites the 2004 Shanghai marriage statistics that back up this observation: 90 percent of Shanghai’s international marriages in 2004 were between a foreign man and a Chinese woman (Statistical abstracts of Shanghai, 2004, cited by Farrer 2008: 7). Thus the cloak of invisibility worn by Western women is in part due to the unlikelihood of their sexual involvement with Chinese men.

However, the cloak of invisibility is also created by the interactions between Western men and Western women, particularly in a context, such as PSU, where women’s social and professional milieu mainly comprises other Westerners. Several interviewees commented on Western women as compared to Chinese women, who they construct as more ‘feminine’ and more submissive:

We don’t always want a woman who will do what you say. But I think, in the West, women have got a lot of power now, and I don’t think men like that as much, so Chinese girls suit us, and we suit the Chinese girls, so it’s a good match.

(Alan ‘Western Men’ focus group 13/06/2009)


I was dissatisfied with the way women are in England. There’s this kind of ladette culture there. They’re very, they’re more assertive and more aggressive and I just felt women had lost their … femininity. The equality thing, sexual equality … don’t get me wrong, I am a feminist to a degree, but the balance has been lost … [Chinese women have] more traditional family values.


Every man, no matter where he’s from, wants a woman who’ll be like, ‘yeah honey, I’ll be home, I’ll dress [in] this nice little skirt you bought for me’. Chinese women, they’re going to do that. Caucasian [=Western?] girls, they don’t.


Alan, Ollie and Leo’s critiques, like Ryan’s yin-yang Taoist framing of ‘worshipping femininity’, serve to reduce and stereotype Western as well as Chinese women, in their assertions that Western women are unfeminine (judged against the fantastical, Orientalist criteria of ‘submissive’, Chinese women) and that Western women have become too independent, powerful, assertive, and aggressive in comparison. While there is doubtless a problem in some UK subcultures of violence between women (this is the ‘ladette culture’ that Ollie mentions) the Western men quoted here are actually critiquing their own reduction in power in the context of more empowered, Western women, comparing this to the comparatively greater power men once wielded in Western cultures. They cite the power that Western men wield in relationships with Chinese women and, in comparison to this, claim that Western women are too powerful.

The discourse of ‘unfeminine’ Western women adds to the cloak of invisibility, which is described as follows:

Getting into a group [of predominantly male colleagues] like this you are naturally, kind of, de-sexed, where you become this kind of non-threatening gender-neutral woman. They don’t really look at you like a woman, you’re a guy who happens to have breasts. You’re not an object of desire so you’re non-threatening, which is why Ryan will then sit there and talk about all his girlfriends, because I’m a pal, I’m not really a woman. That’s how a Western woman can co-exist in this kind of guys group.


Before I got together with [my boyfriend], they [the Western men at PSU] made me feel like I was just this fat, White girl who thinks she’s a boy. … They made me feel like, ‘oh, you’ll never get a boyfriend here because everyone just likes Chinese women. Like, why would you come to China as a woman? ... They treated us [Western women] like we weren’t real women … we didn’t really exist.



ALAN: [Western teachers] come here [to China] on their own, and as a guy it’s not too bad … we get a group of mates and we get the Chinese girls as well. Whereas I think the girls really struggle out here. … [Chinese men] wouldn’t know how to deal with a Western woman. And for us, like, Western women, they’re invisible.

TODD: They don’t exist.(‘Western Men’ focus group 13/06/2009)

Thus the lived reality of Western women in this context is sexual invisibility among Western men and the intrusion of Orientalist/Occidentalist stereotyping in potential relationships with Chinese men.

Living under the cloak of invisibility

Working at PSU puts Western women into an environment where a majority of their colleagues are Western men. As most of the participants and other PSU foreign teachers arrived in Shanghai knowing no-one, most socialize with their colleagues. However some of the Western men behave in ways that would be considered unprofessional in a work environment in their home countries. Two women interviewees explain:

The way Western male teachers behave in staffrooms is shocking, the lewd pictures, strutting around like peacocks … it would be totally unacceptable in Canada, but this is just the male group culture here.

(Ursula ‘Old China Hands’ focus group 08/09/2007)

At work, it’s kind of a boys’ club, isn’t it? … But sometimes it is too boyish … I really like the boys one on one, but if there’s a big gang of them I really need one of the girls. … I know that Claire finds it quite intimidating.


Outside of work, there was a feeling, discussed above, that Western women were invisible to Western men, although Westerners formed the primary social circle for most of the teachers. While a few of the Western women I met in Shanghai were in relationships with Chinese men, this was unusual, and many of the women teachers formed, instead, strong friendships with other Western women.

As a result, several women felt dissatisfied with their private lives in Shanghai. Trish, an informant and language school English teacher, who describes a similar ‘boys club’ in her staffroom environment, commented:

It’s just all work and no play. And there’s not enough light and shade in my life. It gets tedious … I’m not a part of a community or anything like that. … I don’t feel like I’m living a real life … I went back to Australia and, oh yes, I was strongly reminded of the fact that all my friends are married and


have kids now and have got a mortgage, and are renovating on weekends. And I’m not doing any of those things … you know, the time clock’s ticking, I’m still not married, if I want to have kids time’s getting away … as a Western woman, I simply don’t exist here.

(Trish ‘interview’ 15/09/2007)

Trish is in her 30s, as is Beth, who cites age as her main reason for not having a partner. But Beth also says she has had a number of brief encounters with Chinese men and women that she met online:

I’ve sidestepped most of this [relationships] stuff … For me partly it’s my age … someone my age, they’re going to be most likely looking for a more permanent partner, and I’m here, clearly, temporarily, because of my studies. So the chances of me living in China are slim to nil, so I think that’s one reason why I haven’t gotten involved with anything here


Beth’s sexuality perhaps makes her story atypical, although she also lives very much under the cloak of invisibility in terms of not making public her sexual identity, which she hides from most of the PSU teachers and from her students. However, this is perhaps unrelated to Shanghai. Beth is a private person and may struggle to ‘come out’ at work; this is common in many contexts (Ferfolja 2009). However, at PSU, as discussed in Chapter 8, the foreign teachers may represent ‘foreignness’ as well as themselves as individuals. Beth comments:

I haven’t gone in on day one and said ‘I’m Beth, I’m from Texas, and I’m gay’, because I want to maintain a sort of distance, that I’m not just their friend. …. I’m still here in a formal capacity even if I’m not treated that way. … You’re the only foreigner [the students] know and you’re giving them this little glimpse into your life. … We’re objects of gossip among the students because, for a lot of students, we’re the first foreigners they’ve spoken to. So, no, I don’t talk about it.


While Beth has not disclosed her own sexual identity to her students, she says she has created an environment in her classes where attitudes towards sexual identity can be discussed as part of teaching ‘Western culture’, which she says is more tolerant of gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered identities than China. As a result, Beth seems to have positioned herself as a ‘foreign friend’ in whom the students might confide. Beth explains:

One of my students came out to me in her last class. She was gauging my reaction to it … I think she told me because it was safer. If I reacted badly, she would never see me again; if I reacted positively or neutrally she could talk about it a little more. Also I’m sufficiently older than her that I’m kind


of an adult so I think this was a step closer to telling other adults. … It’s happened for several of my gay students; I’ve become this sort of weird confessional for them. And also I’ve talked about, not myself, but I’ve talked about the gay experience in the West.


Beth’s is an invisibility that may allow her to build confidences through shared experiences. However, there appears to be a perception that lesbian/bisexual sexualities may necessarily be more closeted in Shanghai than in the USA. So Beth’s experience is of a cloak of invisibility that is partly attributed but also appropriated as a protection from students’ curiosity and surveillance. This may well be the situation for some men too; what would the PSU experience look like from a gay male perspective? Unfortunately, it is impossible to know from this case study as all the men I interviewed self-identified as heterosexual. As a result, I am aware that this chapter is very heteronormative. This is the nature of qualitative research, though: not all stories are necessarily told.

For heterosexual Western women in Shanghai, like Karen, the cloak of invisibility is more attributed than appropriated. As discussed above, Western men appear to be focused almost exclusively on Chinese women’s apparent submissiveness and Chinese men may not be interested in Western women because of family or other pressures. In addition, Chinese men may not live up to Western women’s constructions of masculinity. This is particularly salient for young, single Western women who, like the young Western men cited in this chapter, may come to China to acquire life experience; they may also be in Shanghai for only a short time, and may also want to have ‘fun’. Unlike for Trish, cited above, a permanent relationship is not necessarily their goal. However, the cloak of invisibility may cause them to disappear sexually and some respond by engaging in a kind of arms race. Karen explains:

You become more slutty here because you have to compete with what the Chinese girls are wearing, and that’s what you see in the bars. It’s all these Western women wearing skirts that, when they bend over, you can see their bums. It’s something that you wouldn’t really see anywhere else except for in China.


In the two years between August 2007 and July 2009, Karen lost weight (which is not to say that she was overweight previously), dyed her hair blonde, and started wearing more revealing clothes. She says her boyfriend has encouraged her to change her image but that he still suffers taunts from Western men:

Last night, we went for a drink with [some of the PSU teachers] and Ryan, Todd, and Alan started telling him ‘oh, you got the wrong girl there, [Ryan’s girlfriend] is much fitter than Karen, you should have got her’. They were


only kidding around but it really hurt me. … They made me feel like … everyone just likes Chinese women. Like, why on earth would you come to China as a woman?


Ryan exemplifies this attitude to Western women that Karen described:

I wouldn’t say that I hate White women but I don’t think I’ll ever end up with a White woman … Western women, they can play a lot of games, so for example, this Ukrainian girl [with whom Ryan had had a one-night stand, an incident Beth mentioned], it was very easy to not see her again because all I had to do was not call. I’m sure she’s pissed off, but, right, it’s over. Whereas with a Chinese girl, she would have called me the next day. With Western women it’s always like, ‘you’re an individual, I’m an individual’. So they’re not as flexible and able to make things work. I’m just not really attracted to them either … I don’t pay much attention to Western women out here.


That Ryan attributes Western women’s individualism and independence to game playing is perhaps indicative of his heightened expectations about women’s pursuit of men, based on his own experiences of Chinese women.

Of course, some Western women do maintain relationships with Western men, perhaps those with whom they have come to China, as Claire and Ursula did. However, anecdotal evidence abounds among Shanghai expatriate women of Western men who leave their Western women partners once they come to China and experience the attentions of some Chinese women. Western women may also quickly tire of the ‘drinking and whoring’ culture lived by some Western men in Shanghai. This is particularly true for people whose insufficient Chinese language skills and whose working arrangements among other Westerners do not make for easy access to a local social group. This may result in a feeling that there is no alternative but to associate with people whose behaviour they might otherwise avoid. Karen explains:

I really miss real foreigners [i.e. non-Chinese people], not the selection that comes to China … they’re all the same. The men think they’re better than everyone else, they’ve got this big ego, the way they talk about women, all that stuff, the drinking culture … And I don’t really know that many [Western] women out here, they don’t really stick around … It’s just a party and, like, I’m still really young [25] but I feel too old to be doing this now.


This may seem a rather depressing picture, but life under the cloak of invisibility can also be a place of strong friendships and some very dynamic careers, particularly


for managers, like Zoe and Val, as there is an opportunity, and perhaps an expectation, for Western women to focus on career in Shanghai.

Leo and the boys’ club at PSU

The cloak of invisibility may also be explained in part by the ‘boys club’ nature of the work environment for foreign teachers at PSU. Dan describes this as ‘a fraternal atmosphere in the office; it’s like going to the frat house. … They all band together, and everything about teaching’s ‘bullshit’ (Dan ‘interview’ 10/06/2009). Beth similarly critiqued the ‘frat house’ staffroom environment, which Karen described in more detail, including its defining features of hedonistic partying and objectifying women. This is confirmed by observation: the social lives and in-group discourse of many of the PSU teachers, particularly the men, revolve around heavy drinking, both at each other’s apartments and in expatriate bars like the Blue Frog. Perhaps as a result, at least two of the foreign teachers at PSU seem to experience problems with alcohol: Todd arrived for our lunchtime interview drinking from a soft drink bottle filled with baijiu (a strong Chinese spirit; Beth and Ryan confirmed this is normal behaviour for Todd). Similarly, Harry, who shared an apartment with Karen in 2007, was reportedly drinking himself to unconsciousness most evenings. In addition, Ryan describes himself as having ‘smoked a ton of dope’ during his time at PSU (Ryan ‘interview’ 10/06/2009). While these are lifestyle choices the individuals make, these issues may also be symptomatic of underlying problems for which there are few outlets. For example, there are no counselling services available to the PSU foreign teachers.

Karen attributed the PSU workplace discourse at least in part to Leo:

I really like Leo ... but he’s not exactly boss material, is he? … Some of the stuff I’ve heard him talk about … like about going out on the piss and women, I see him less of a boss now and more like … yeah, a brother, a housemate … [the PSU work environment] it’s a boys’ club. … It feels like a boys’ club and Leo’s the head of the boys’ club. That’s what me and Claire always say. … I wouldn’t go to him [Leo] with a problem because I know that he would tell the lads. … Leo’s approachable, don’t get me wrong, but I also see him as kind of too friendly with some of the other teachers.


Phil also described the problem, which he attributes in part to the difficulty of recruiting Western women teachers and the resultant gender imbalance in the staffroom. Phil says he has a positive discrimination policy where he hires women over men if at all possible, because:

The attention they [the young men working as foreign teachers] get, it makes them … see themselves as being more than Chinese men, above Chinese men. That could just be age, or the White male sense of latent superiority … In the staffroom, you have to really push for equality, if you left it to its


natural devices the boys would really drown out the girls. … Leo is part of that, and maybe he’s not powerful enough to stop Ryan of two years ago making comments like that [that he ‘hates White women’, which Ryan reportedly told Claire in 2007] and getting away with it.


In partly blaming Leo for the ‘boys club’, Phil cites Leo’s management style, borne perhaps of Leo’s insecurity as a manager. Leo may perceive a need to perform as the teachers’ confidante as he is aware that he lacks legitimacy as Director of Studies.

Phil’s comment, that the Ryan ‘of two years ago’ is different to the Ryan of 2009, is important to note, though, as the boys club atmosphere did change in the two academic years between August 2007 and June 2009. This may be due to the feedback Phil gave Leo at his performance appraisal in June 2008. Leo described this feedback, responding to Karen’s de-identified quote about Leo as ‘the head of the boys’ club’ (cited above):

Yes, that was exactly what was going on. Phil talked to me about it [in June 2008] and I changed. I don’t do sake bombs [a drinking game] with the boys anymore; I don’t talk about women with the boys anymore. … I purposely hired more women and distanced myself from the boys. I changed. … I feel that my authority, my respect from the teachers, my relationship [with them] … has weakened in many different ways, because … for the past two years I have been struggling with the idea of ‘who am I?’ as the manager at PSU. … Last summer, Phil and I sat down and he said … ‘you’ve got to be more academic. … You’ve got to be a manager, you’ve got to have that authority, step back, not drink with your teachers, [not] make jokes with the teachers, you’ve got to make them respect you. … By doing that I sacrificed knowing things; teachers don’t sit beside me on the bus [to the satellite campus] anymore, I don’t really know a lot of things that are going because people don’t tell me things anymore, and I feel that I have, in some ways, lost control and respect.


Perhaps as a result, when I revisited in 2009 the two staffrooms seemed to have polarized, with most of the women teachers, and Sam, working in the South staffroom, and Alan, Todd, Ryan, Jon, Beth, and Liz (a non-participant teacher and Beth’s 2008–2009 housemate) in the North staffroom. Dan described the North staffroom as ‘the Room of Doom’ for Leo, as it is the source of many grievances from teachers and much of the ‘boys club’ attitudes and practices. Meanwhile, the women in the South staffroom seemed to have formed close friendships among themselves. Dan, as the senior teacher in 2008–2009, worked in the department office with Leo.

Within the ‘Room of Doom’, Ryan and Beth seem to be leaders, and Dan describes them as ‘holding court at lunchtimes with the other teachers’ (Dan


‘interview’ 10/06/2009). While Beth does not take an active part in the ‘boys club’ discourse, she says she grew up with brothers and feels more comfortable among the men in the North staffroom than she does among the other women; she says she ‘hate[s] girl chat’ and is ‘no good at it’. Beth and Liz perform the role of an audience for the boys club, by enjoying the ‘drinking and whoring’ stories and fully engaging in the other ‘Room of Doom’ discourse. As Dan described, this is a discourse in which Leo’s management, and oral teaching English generally, are critiqued as ‘bullshit’.

Thus Leo’s leadership of the boys club seems to have passed to Ryan. This has resulted in the construction, by the teachers in the North staffroom, of Leo as an ‘idiot’, which Dan describes:

He’s a monkey boy, he’s a jerk ... he’s an idiot, they can make fun of him, oh, ‘dance monkey, dance’. It’s just that total ‘fuck with Leo’ attitude … it’s because they were mad at everything and [Leo’s] just the closest authority figure. He’s had a real shit storm this semester and he’s fucked up, he’s made some mistakes, and I complained to Phil, like, ‘I think he’s got this problem as a manager, he’s got to get a handle on it’ But I think they intensified it, and a ‘witch hunt’ wouldn’t be too strong, you know? They rip him up and down and then they can be nice to him. But for them Leo’s beneath contempt; Leo’s a joke.


Leo also perceives that his role has changed, and describes his discomfort with his new role in which he is separate from the teachers and perhaps more associated with management of the program than ‘one of the boys’:

I was more comfortable being the head of the boys club because I knew how to do that. So I was in a new role [in 2008–2009]… I’d made that step but I was sort of stuck in the middle going, like, ‘shit, I can’t go back, I can’t go forwards, and I need this job’, and it’s been like that for the past year. … I felt more comfortable in the initial role, as a friend, as a mentor. I think they feel more comfortable that way, that’s why I chose to be in that kind of role, but it’s not accepted by the regular, conventional thinking of what a manager should be.


So it appears that men and women foreign teachers have different experiences at PSU, and that these differences can be attributed in part to gender roles constructed and maintained by some Western men’s responses to the reification of exonormative Western masculinities by some Chinese women, including women PSU students. This allowed for the creation of a ‘boys club’ in the North staffroom and for misogynistic attitudes and behaviours to be manifest, not least by Leo (particularly in 2007–2008) although he is ostensibly the teachers’ manager. In the absence of either teaching qualifications or stereotypically


‘Western’ Whiteness Leo appears to feel the need to legitimize himself as a ‘Western’ teacher by performing his construction of this identity.

Identity struggles

Most of the participants and informants cited in this chapter appear to be struggling, to a greater or lesser degree, with the very complex, cross-cultural, neo-imperialistic, powerful/powerless situation in which they have put themselves, and the influences on their own identities mediated through the experiences they have and the sensemaking they undertake. They respond differently, and this section examines their responses. The effects of the PSU experience on teachers’ identities are discussed further in Chapter 11.

At one end of the spectrum, Jon is clear that his experience at PSU is a phase in his life that will one day be behind him, and he embraces the playboy role seemingly expected of Western men in Shanghai. Though Jon engages in ‘bad behaviour’, his experiences may be among the least challenging to his own identity, as Jon seems to construct his China experience as conceptually separate from his ‘real life’, in the sensemaking he undertakes. Jon explains:

As to it changing your personality, I don’t think it does in the long term. I will definitely change when teaching or with a Chinese girl but it’s just a censored version of myself with maybe the odd lie to make myself not sound like such a bastard, but then when you hang out with your Western mates again you slip back to the real you, so it never really has the chance to change you. I noticed this when I came home [for the summer]. It was like I never left, going back to my mates, although my conversations were definitely much more girl orientated. Because I do better with women out there [in China] there’s more opportunity to talk about it with mates. Basically, it probably has turned me a bit more of a perv[ert]. A few months back in England would cure me I’m sure, although that’s probably why guys stay out there.

(Jon ‘e-mail from the UK’ 18/07/2009)

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Dan describes the professional frustration, social isolation, and loneliness he has experienced during the 2008/2009 academic year, as he has largely withdrawn from the teachers’ social circle and does not engage in romantic encounters with Chinese women. He rejects the identity attributed to (and appropriated by some) Western men in Shanghai and says he feels revulsion at the behaviour of some of his colleagues. Dan left Shanghai in July 2009 and says he wishes he had not returned for a second contract (as Senior Teacher) in August 2008. As discussed, Dan is the most professionally committed of all the teacher participants, and his perception of instrumental motivation and a consequent lack of professionalism of many of his PSU teacher colleagues, such as Ryan and Jon, was a constant source of frustration for him. This was particularly salient as popular, younger Western men, like Ryan and Jon, often scored more


highly on students’ evaluations than Dan did, despite the lesson preparation Dan put in and the fact that, judged against CELTA criteria, Dan’s lessons were much more effective than Ryan’s. Dan was thus sensemaking not just about the PSU situation itself but also about the unexpected exchange values of different forms of capital, in which his own (committed teacher/teacher effectiveness) capitals were less highly valued than Jon and Ryan’s ‘superhero’ capital and Ryan’s ‘China’ capital. This issue is revisited in Chapter 10.

Between Jon and Dan’s extremes, Alan, Todd, and Ryan struggle with personal and enacted identities, and with the conflicting demands of peer pressure and the need for sensemaking within their own habitus. Alan has responded by removing himself from the ‘bad behaviour’ while still framing his discourse in peer-approved terms. Todd attempts to normalize and rationalize his behaviours with reference to local norms. And Ryan says he disapproves of much of his own behaviour, while seemingly having internalized much of its implicit Orientalism. Ryan’s case is intriguing, as he appears to be struggling with his own behaviours, on the one hand critiquing Westerners who are ‘losers back home … but who come to China to exploit the possibilities here’, while on the other hand describing his own time in China as ‘like being the star of my own movie’ (Ryan ‘interview’ 12/06/2009). As described above, Ryan describes himself as ‘self-medicating’ (i.e. regularly smoking marijuana) perhaps as a response to the identity struggles he experiences. These identity struggles also relate to his professional identity, which is discussed further in Chapter 11. Beth explains her perception of possible effects of the gendered identities often attributed to Western men in Shanghai, citing the cases of Jon and Ryan:

A young, cute guy that comes out here may not know what he’s in for and suddenly he starts looking around at all these girls who seem to be focused directly on him, and they end up kind of like Jon, who’s just gone crazy out here; any possible girl that looks at him he is ready to go to bed with. … So you end up with guys like that, or eventually guys like Ryan, who’s had so many beautiful Chinese girls that he gets with a girl who has any sort of physical imperfection, or any kind of imperfection, and that’s it, he’s done with her.


Leo’s case is somewhat different from that of the other participants; Phil suggests that Leo ‘takes refuge in the macho identity because the nationality and ethnicity questions are just so complex for him’ (Phil ‘interview’ 01/06/2008). Having embraced the ‘macho identity’ as ‘head of the boys club’ initially, Leo now says he rejects the PSU staffroom discourse. Nevertheless, he does still perform some of the staffroom ‘boys’ chat’, perhaps as a way of creating rapport with other teachers. But many ridiculed Leo in interviews, describing him as, for example, ‘increasingly erratic and unprofessional’ (Beth ‘interview’ 09/06/2009) and as ‘a fake, a phoney’ (Ryan ‘interview’ 10/06/2009). By the time of my third visit, in June 2009, there was a strong feeling of discontent among the PSU teachers,


much of it directed at Leo and their perception of his poor management skills. By trying to be ‘one of the gang’ Leo erodes the respect the teachers might have had for his Director of Studies role.

Finally, the gendered identities described in this chapter seem to have had lesser effects on Phil, Karen, and Beth, perhaps because Phil and Karen are in relationships that appear to be stronger than Ryan’s, for example, and because Beth firmly frames her purpose in Shanghai as temporary and clearly focused on collecting data for her PhD. However, Karen says she struggles with the discourse and behaviours of her Western colleagues and friends, describing herself as having ‘become too hardened here [in Shanghai], I’ve heard it all … it’s like I’m immune to every moral, ethical thing’ (Karen ‘interview’ 14/06/2009). While Karen negotiates this discourse in her relationships with her peers, she says she wants to leave Shanghai but that she and her Chinese-Portuguese partner have struggled to find work outside of China, and that they therefore have no choice but to stay. She explains:

I feel really lost here sometimes … I want to live somewhere where I can make a life, start to think about buying a house, not have to worry about ‘one day I’ll have to leave this country’. … I want to live somewhere where I can imagine having children. … Here, I could, but it would be difficult and I don’t know if I would last another year. I just want a bit of safety in my life now.


In contrast, Phil describes Shanghai as his home and does not yearn to leave China. He says he wants his children to grow up in Shanghai, and that he feels a kinship with the Chinese because, ‘when I look in the family album it’s all photos of Chinese people’ (Phil ‘interview’ 12/06/2009).

Conclusion

This chapter has shown that the classroom experiences of the participants in this study must be contextualized against a background of lived realities in Shanghai. In my discussion of teachers’ non-work lives I have focused on gender because there is a distinct difference in the way the men and women are constructed, and therefore how they experience their time in China. But this is not essentialist. While men and women have different experiences, there are greater differences between individuals. I have theorized that these differences are attributable to different types and amounts of capital and the way these are valued in Shanghai. Ryan’s story indicates the way in which the capital of being a young, handsome, blond, flirtatious, Western man can be used in a teaching context in which the students are mostly young women.

It is proposed, therefore, that the capital that foreign teachers need to prosper at PSU is not the same as the type of capital that would be expected in other ELT contexts. As I discussed in Chapter 8, it appears that oral English teaching at PSU


needs to be reconceptualized as a different kind of undertaking altogether. For experienced, qualified ELT professionals reading this who are not young, blond, handsome, and flirtatious, the sad fact is that the PSU students would likely prefer Ryan or Jon to you or me.

This raises the issue, then, that capital types other than the ability to teach oral English (however this might be conceptualized) seem to be required of foreign teachers at PSU. As a result, the successful completion of a short ELT course such as CELTA may well be an ineffective predictor of success. Teacher success is not the same construct as teacher effectiveness, though, and in the next chapter I explore these constructs, discussing the extent to which short ELT courses enable teachers to be effective in this context.

10 Training outcomes and teacher needs

This chapter draws together the stories told up to this point to answer the first research question: To what extent do short ELT courses equip teachers with the skills they need to teach in this context? My unequivocal conclusion is that such courses do not equip teachers sufficiently well for teaching at PSU. This is because the teachers’ role, although never adequately clarified, comprises aspects other than language teaching. So while this section does critique CELTA-type courses, it is primarily an evaluation of the skills the teachers need in the context and an examination of the mismatch with CELTA-type course outcomes.

How fair is it, though, to critique the situational demands made of teachers? Contextual specificity of methodology ought, surely, to place the demands of stakeholders in local contexts at centre stage, with teacher preparation courses taking their lead from the demands of students and institutions. However, the participants occupy a liminal place mainly as cultural curiosities. This role is problematic as it serves not to develop students’ and teachers’ intercultural competence but instead to create and entrench barriers to intercultural communication. This is contrary both to the stated curriculum objectives and to wider accepted norms of what English language teaching should do. If we have any shared values as a profession, one central tenet must surely be that we believe in equitable intercultural communication rather than perpetuating misunder-standings and stereotyping. My critique of this situation is that instead of developing the intercultural competence of those involved it reduces it. For this reason, I critique the demands made of foreign teachers in the context.

Four models of teacher effectiveness and success

As discussed in Chapter 2 assessing teachers’ work is notoriously difficult and one of the key issues is defining a set of criteria against which teachers might be evaluated. This depends on the purpose of the teachers’ roles, and, as described in Chapter 6, this is never adequately clarified. In the absence of an explicit purpose, four models of teacher effectiveness and success assume four separate, implied, purposes; these are shown in Figure 10.1. I differentiate between teacher effectiveness as a construct related to English language teaching purposes and teacher success as non-ELT reasons for teachers’ employment. The first two

Training outcomes and teacher needs 195

Curriculum ideology;curriculum purpose

Foreign teachers’purpose

Match toCELTA outcomes

Model 1 Social and economicefficiency; ‘meeting the needs of the country and society for qualified personnel’ (Chinese Ministry of Education, 2007:24).

Develop students’communicativecompetence inspoken English.

Yes

Model 2 Academic rationalism;passing largely discrete-point CET exam; explicitknowledge of discretelanguage items.

‘Activate’ Englishalready taught ‘intheory’ in previouscourses.

Yes, although mainly a match to ‘oral fluency development’criterion.

Model 3 ‘[T]he development ofstudents’ cultural capacity and the teaching of knowledge about different cultures in the world’(Chinese Ministry ofEducation, 2007:32).

Teach studentsabout ‘differentcultures’; Providecontact withforeigners; be‘foreign friends’;perform ‘foreignness’.

No

Model 4 ‘affirm ... Chinese superiority’ (Gries, 2005:42).

Perform ‘foreignidiot’ role as a foilto Chinese identity.

No

Figure 10.1 Four conceptual models of foreign teachers’ purpose

models might be deemed measures of teacher effectiveness while models three and four are measures of teacher success.

The first potential purpose of oral English is that stated in the curriculum. These needs are conceptualized as the production of a workforce that can communicate effectively in English, in order to make China economically competitive. While we might question the utility of having every university graduate in every discipline learn English, China’s push for English is widely acknowledged as one of its main education goals. Within this paradigm, oral English would function to equip students with oral communication skills, and so if these were the criteria against which teachers’ work were to be judged, an effective teacher would be one who successfully improves students’ abilities to communicate in English. This purpose would correspond with the purpose of English language teaching assumed by CELTA-type teacher training courses, in which the aim is to develop students’ communicative competence.

However, the curriculum stipulates that non-English majors should pass the CET examination before graduating, and this is a source of inconsistency between stated curriculum aims and the goals of the curriculum in practice. There are two implications that may follow from this situation. The first is that because CET does not test oral communication skills the purpose of oral English might be to fill this gap. An effective teacher, in this second model, would be one who successfully ‘activates’ students’ inert knowledge. This is the understanding of


language acquisition that my PSU students described as ‘download and install’. Whether language is actually acquired in this way is dubious, but in this second model the teacher effectiveness criterion would be the extent to which teachers successfully ‘activate’ students’ rules-based knowledge through practice.

But this does not seem to be the main pressure on teachers, which indicates that the non-linguistic purposes of foreign teachers are more important. This provides a third set of criteria against which teachers might be evaluated: providing intercultural contact. However, this may entail teachers performing a Western ‘foreignness’ that is ‘made in China’. This would explain students’ disappointment with teachers who do not resemble the stereotypical blond(e), White, fun foreigners they may have imagined. To be successful against these criteria, then, a teacher would look and behave stereotypically ‘foreign’, as this is constructed in China, and would motivate and encourage students to engage with the Other by providing a non-threatening environment in which to do so.

However, as discussed in Chapter 3, there is a dualistic nationalism discourse of victim/victor in China (H. Li 2008). An extension of the ‘intercultural contact’ purpose, therefore, might be to allow for the construction of foreign teachers as harmless ‘foreign idiots’ against which to construct and revel in Chinese identity. Whether or not this is intended, this does seem to be a hidden curriculum of oral English at PSU. Successful teaching judged against these criteria would comprise showing deference to China so as to construct Chineseness as the envy of foreign Others. This is similar to Gorfinkel and Chubb’s (2012) analysis of the role of foreigners on Chinese television. So a successful teacher in this implied curriculum would be a harmlessly ‘fun’ foreigner who does not challenge Occidentalist notions of superiority but who instead works for China. This would require performing stereotypical foreignness and reifying the idea that foreign teachers are less effective than the Chinese. Thus the fourth set of criteria against which teachers might be judged is the extent to which they ‘affirm … Chinese superiority’ (Gries 2005: 42).

It is impossible to know which of these, and in what combination, are currently used by students to evaluate their foreign teachers at PSU. As has been discussed in previous chapters, elements from all four models are factors in students’ evaluations of their foreign teachers. So both the ‘effectiveness’ and ‘success’ models are relevant as teachers are evaluated variously against a combination of models. Under discussion, then, is the extent to which short ELT courses enable foreign teachers to be effective in this context against the various models of foreign teachers’ purpose.

While the balance between the various models of the foreign teacher role is unknowable, the popularity of teachers like Ryan and the unpopularity of teachers like Dan allow access to the hidden construct of the criteria against which students actually evaluate teachers. Beth summarizes this, discussing her perception of the ‘ideal teacher’ profile:

Young, preferably male ... [and] the whole easy, relaxed manner. White, probably blond, or blue eyes at least, attractive, and funny. And if somebody


can get in and do that, then there you go. You’ll have somebody who’s incredibly popular, and that would be effective from the university’s point of view. Popular, the students like him, they don’t complain. … Like Phil. He’s cute, he’s funny and he has that manner, that relaxed easy manner with people.


From this, the capital of an ‘easy, relaxed manner’ is the most important quality for foreign teachers. In contrast, an attempt to be a ‘proper teacher’ and to ‘try to teach language’ is the source of unpopularity, particularly if this is done with insufficient smiling and ‘fun’. While Phil is a qualified English language teacher with good intercultural awareness, he is also very engaging and personable, as well as tall and good looking, and he makes use in class of references and examples from Chinese pop culture. Ryan’s story indicates that these qualities are more valuable in the context than the ability to teach English. Will, a teacher recruiter and manager, confirms this, referring to foreigners teaching English in China more generally:

It’s more about if you fit in, if you create the right atmosphere, if you’re the right kind of person. And if you’ve got qualifications then it’s a bit of a bonus.


Perhaps, then, Phil’s most valuable form of capital is not what he thinks; his easygoing manner may be worth more than his teaching. However, CELTA-type courses teach language teaching, not easygoingness. The next section therefore critiques such courses and their utility for PSU.

Critiquing CELTA outcomes

As discussed previously, the CELTA model of teacher training, as opposed to education, confers a ‘toolkit of techniques’. Although ‘context’ is mentioned in CELTA documents, an important critique of CELTA-type courses is that they do not offer sufficient grounding in the theory behind the techniques. As a result, when teachers teach in a context other than the training context, they may encounter different assumptions, such as the assumption that language can be learned ‘in theory’ and then ‘activated’ through oral English. As discussed in Chapter 6, this practice is at odds with the implicit theories of language and language acquisition behind CELTA. In a situation like this, teachers may struggle to explain, let alone adapt, their teaching toolkit. Thus, by attempting to codify a universal notion of context-free ‘effective’ teaching, CELTA-type courses do not equip teachers to respond in principled ways to contextual novelty.

Ours has been called a post-methods era, and Canagarajah (2002: 149) writes that ‘[m]ethods can … blind expatriate teachers to the socio-cultural context of the classrooms they are entering’. While this might serve to legitimize any and all teaching, there are still some shared understandings of what it means to be an effective English teacher (e.g. Pasternak and Bailey 2004). However, pluralism within ‘effective’ teaching is widely acknowledged.


However, it appears that not all CELTA trainers have been informed. CELTA, by its very brevity, is necessarily quite prescriptive. And although trainers may be aware of the ‘post-methods’ position, methodological relativism is an anathema on some CELTA courses. In my experience of teaching on CELTA and CELTA-type courses among trainers based in many countries, there seem to be shared understandings of ‘correct’ ways to structure lessons and ‘correct’ ways to develop students’ macro-skills, for example. While some, perhaps more experienced, trainers are more willing to accommodate trainees who use techniques of which they themselves disapprove (e.g. pronunciation drilling from the written form), others I have encountered have been quite dogmatic about the single ‘way’ to teach, and appear to conceive learning teaching as learning to implement a series of rigid ‘technologies’ (Tudor 2001).

Underpinning widespread methodological universalism, a common culture of learning appears to be understood and assumed among CELTA trainers. This includes largely shared theories of language (as communication), language learning (as acquisition through use and awareness-based focus on form), and English (as a lingua franca, but referring to educated, ‘centre’ native speaker norms as a ‘standard’). My own experience is triangulated by some research into the beliefs and practices of CELTA trainers/trainers-in-training (A. Bailey 2009; Brandt 2006; Delaney 2007; Hockly 2000; Thaine 2004).

The assumptions of CELTA are partially coded in its assessment criteria, many of which are worded in such a way as to be open to trainers’ and assessors’ interpretation. Thus CELTA, while ostensibly relativistic, may in practice be implemented in ways that reinforce trainers’ and assessors’ shared norms of ‘good’ language teaching. Most CELTA trainers and assessors are ‘Western’ native English speakers and most were, themselves, trained on CELTA/DELTA. In addition, most CELTA courses are undertaken in Western contexts, either Anglophone settings in which teaching practice groups are multilingual or European contexts such as Spain. While trainers’ paradigms of ‘good’ teaching may be appropriate for small groups of motivated, adult students in these contexts, these are not necessarily the paradigms they, themselves, would bring to teaching in a different context, such as a Chinese university.

Most of the participants thought it unnecessary to adapt their practice to ‘fit’ the teaching context, and the issue of there being very different cultures of learning and very different underpinning assumptions about language and language learning is not problematized at PSU, and certainly not by Leo. The view of language teaching as a universal ‘technology’ is reinforced, and perhaps inculcated, by the existence and participants’ experiences of teacher training courses that purport to train teachers to teach anywhere.

Sam did problematize the poor ‘fit’ of his ELT course methodology to the PSU context; he was trained on a Trinity Certificate in TESOL in the UK and his stated motivation is to pursue a career in ELT. But he framed the problem as student passivity rather than methodological inappropriateness:


I tried hard for ages to follow what my Trinity Cert training had taught me to do but in reality it doesn’t work in the Chinese [university oral English] context [at PSU]. … I’d walk into lessons and give the students something to do. The response: blank faces and silence.

(Sam ‘e-mail’ 26/06/2009)

This poor fit is in part attributable to curriculum separation, as teachers’ trained in integrated language/skills teaching may struggle to teach only oral English. However, the problem goes beyond a mismatch in teaching content.

The main weapon missing from Sam’s arsenal is that of ‘creating the right atmosphere’ in class, as Will puts it. This is of paramount importance at PSU, however it is covered only by a single criterion in CELTA assessment: ‘Establishing good rapport with learners and ensuring they are fully involved in learning activities’ (Cambridge ESOL 2003). As described above, this and other criteria, and the relative weighting among criteria, are open to trainers’ and assessors’ interpretations. It may therefore be that trainers who are unaware of the importance of such skills in a context like PSU might pass a CELTA candidate who is grammatically able but whose rapport and ability to involve and motivate students are relatively weaker. Although CELTA candidates have to meet every criterion, the rapport criterion could be met only weakly for a candidate to pass overall, particularly if s/he were strong in other areas usually regarded by trainers as more important, such as the following (language) criteria:

• Analyzing language with attention to form, meaning and phonology and using correct terminology;

• Focusing on language items in the classroom by clarifying relevant aspects of meaning and form (including phonology) for learners to an appropriate degree of depth;

• Using a range of questions effectively for the purpose of elicitation and checking understanding;

• Identifying errors and sensitively correcting learners’ oral and written language in the classroom.

(Cambridge ESOL 2003)

In my experience, CELTA candidates are far more often failed because they do not meet these criteria; rapport is rarely seen as problematic. This is because the CELTA trainers’ paradigm values explicit language knowledge and the ability to provide useful language focus in class above the ‘soft focus’ skills of creating ‘the right atmosphere’. And well it might; CELTA is a language teaching qualification, after all. In many contexts, the CELTA criteria match well with contextual paradigms of what it means to be a ‘good’ beginning teacher, particularly where teachers’ technical knowledge about language and skills in teaching language may be more greatly valued than their more ‘humanistic’ skills.

But the role of the foreign teachers at PSU is not to be a language teacher, or not only and perhaps not mainly to be a language teacher. It is a hybrid role.


Therefore teachers’ personalities, good looks, stereotypical ‘foreignness’ and interest in China, among other qualities, are at least as important in the context as their ability to analyse language, for example. The CELTA criteria are therefore a poor guide to ‘effectiveness’, or ‘success’ as it is understood at PSU. Teachers like Dan may therefore feel frustrated that he cannot achieve ‘proper’ teaching at PSU because the role, which is never adequately defined, does not value the type of teaching understood by CELTA assessment criteria.

Critiquing the CELTA model of post-course support

In addition, CELTA-type courses assume post-course teacher support. The model of teacher training and career development assumed by CELTA-type courses is one of CELTA, then teaching experience, then DELTA or a Master’s degree in ELT. In this model, teachers undertake initial pre-service CELTA-type qualifications. Following this, they teach at an institution where an ELT-qualified Director of Studies supports them with teacher development workshops, observed lessons, guided peer observations, and/or ongoing lesson planning support. After two or more years’ experience, teachers may undertake a further qualification such as Cambridge DELTA or a Masters degree that includes supervised teaching practice. Following this, they are considered fully qualified. Previously, the labels TEFLI (TEFL-initiated) and TEFLQ (TEFL-qualified) were used to distinguish between certificate and diploma-qualified teachers respectively. These labels are no longer used but provide an insight into the way teacher qualifications are conceptualized in this framework (British Council 2008a). So although CELTA-type courses ‘qualify’ teachers and allow for ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Barduhn and Johnson 2009: 63), such courses are seen as a first step only.

Does this model work? Teacher numbers would suggest not. While over 10,000 people undertake CELTA every year, fewer than 1,000 do the DELTA. Of course, some teachers may undertake Masters or other qualifications in place of DELTA, but these numbers indicate a drop-off rate of up to 90 percent. It appears, then, that CELTA-type courses are teachers’ only ELT qualification in a substantial number of cases.

There is also an issue with the nature of the teacher development efforts at PSU. In an attempt to support the teachers, Phil pushes them to include a weekly ‘grammar point’ from the textbook in oral English lessons. In doing this, he is utilizing his own PSU classroom teaching experience and his successful use of the methodological sleight of hand, described in Chapter 6, in which he adapts the PPP lesson structure so as to reassure students and provide face validity. Phil assumes that the PSU teachers, supported by Leo, can emulate this formula.

However, Phil’s sleight of hand may not be a model that can be emulated by inexperienced teachers. Phil explains, having observed many PSU teachers:

A lot of the teachers we get aren’t experienced enough to alter their teaching … to do it in such a way that it feels alive … they lecture, like, a ten minute section of an 80 minute class, but in that ten minute section they lose the


class … and then they have to overcompensate by being entertaining, in order to make it fun, to re-engage the students.


This is underlined by the experiences of teachers like Steph and Dan who tried to ‘teach grammar’ but were insufficiently ‘fun’, so they encountered resistance from their students. It is also confirmed by Mike and Ollie’s observed lessons, in which their language clarification stages were slow paced, with much teacher-fronted explaining and isolated, often erroneous, student utterances. From there, they had to work hard, and use ‘fun’ activities, to recapture the students’ attention.

The lessons planned at the early Wednesday meetings, in 2007, were a version of Phil’s methodological sleight of hand. However, the teachers received little support in analysing language or with planning its clarification and this resulted in slow pace as they tried, often unsuccessfully, to explain the language point and/or extract discrete item examples from students. In this context students may, quite naturally, get frustrated and switch off. However, rather than demand better lesson planning support or resources with which to analyse language, for example, the teachers simply moved away from teaching language at all. Phil blames the teachers for ‘getting swept up into fun’ (Phil ‘e-mail’ 06/10/2008), but it may be that ‘fun’ is simply the only way they have of getting through lessons. As a result, by June 2008 the ‘language point’ had all but disappeared from the Wednesday meetings, which had became primarily brainstorming sessions in which the teachers would suggest topic-linked games to play in that week’s lesson. The teacher support at PSU is therefore far removed from that assumed by the CELTA-type training model.

Leading or misleading? Teacher support at PSU

The participants complained a lot about the type, level, and amount of teacher support they received at PSU. In response, in 2009, Phil appointed Sarah, a British teacher, as a Training Manager working with oral English teachers across several universities. Sarah, however, is yet to complete an ELT Diploma and, like Phil, she is not based at PSU. Both may therefore appear distant:

The teachers don’t feel that you [Phil and Sarah] are accessible or even know if you two are the ones we should contact when problems arise. … You two either need to be more accessible (which I know is not necessarily feasible) or give the teachers a way to contact you and the knowledge that they are welcome to do so. We see you two so rarely that it seems you sweep in, make pronouncements that may or may not be feasible for us to implement, and sweep out again with no time for discussions.

(Beth ‘letter to Phil and Sarah’ that was copied to me by Beth 01/06/2009)

So only Leo and Dan are available every day to support teachers at PSU.


However, as explored in Chapter 5, Leo’s understanding of his role is that of a manager rather than a teacher educator. Perhaps as a result, Leo’s teacher support role declined over the two years I researched at PSU, and Beth complained to Phil and Sarah about Leo:

The level of professionalism from the DoS [Director of Studies] has sharply declined in the four semesters I’ve been here. One of the things a teacher relies on for development is observations and feedback. … The DoS has scheduled observations for teachers and not done them, walked out early, and never given feedback on observations completed. … I feel it’s important for me to say that Leo is the main reason I chose not to re-sign [my contract] for next year.

(Beth ‘letter to Phil and Sarah’ 01/06/2009)

Similarly, Leo’s contributions to Wednesday lesson planning meetings was perhaps less than might be expected of a Director of Studies, and in the meetings I observed in 2007 and 2008 he frequently returned to the issue of ‘how are you going to kill 80 minutes?’

This seems to have created a vacuum in the teacher support side of Director of Studies role, and the returning teachers, including Dan, filled the vacuum. Dan explains, discussing lesson planning meetings:

We’re repeating things [lessons, activities] over and over, and there’s no real development … I feel myself slipping more and more towards that alibi, killer [two commonly used activity types], game, activity … Things aren’t written down so it’s an oral history and [teachers think] ‘well, the language point thing was boring’, so it gets dropped out in the telling. It’s all ‘A to Z then killer’. And so we’re running this pattern and I find it really hard to think of something different, or new, to do, to get outside of that box … It’s getting more and more reductive and we’re kind of trapped by it but we’re also reinforcing it. And the way we handle it, we’re making the circle even smaller.


Phil and Sarah made an attempt to address this as part of their on-going program of teacher development workshops. However, the participants were still critical:

Nothing they give us has any practical application in the classroom, it’s like they’re doing something for their DELTA and meanwhile we’re teaching the program. They’re trying to get us interested in what they’re doing in their DELTA and it’s like, ‘we don’t care, if we want to know we’ll do the DELTA’.


Beth made a further critique, of the format and implementation of sessions:


Since I’ve been here, the training … has become, bluntly, less and less useful. … [T]he training/workshops are often run like a language class, relegating the teachers to the position of students. This can be a useful technique in limited quantities but depending solely on this leaves the sessions light on useful content. … They should be delivering useful information and directing the teachers in useful, focused discussions of the topics so the teachers can begin to integrate the information into their own milieu. I would really recommend running the sessions like a discussion/content workshop.

(Beth ‘letter to Phil and Sarah’ 01/06/2009)

The teacher development sessions are problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, they may be pitched above teachers’ professional developmental level both in terms of the level and amount of theoretical content and the assumption that teachers themselves can link this theory to classroom practice. The second issue is the session format, as workshops seem to be conducted primarily as transmission of content, perhaps with some unfocused discussion.

Another issue in the implementation of the CELTA-then-supported-experience model is that not all of the teachers actually have CELTA-type qualifications. Several of the non-participant teachers, including Alan, Todd, and Jon, held ELT qualifications that are more minimal still than CELTA-type training. These included brief, online courses with no teaching practice or weekend courses in which teaching practice comprised only peer teaching. Additionally, of course, Ryan and others have no ELT qualifications whatsoever. Phil euphemistically describes the PSU teachers as having ‘a broad palette of skills’ (Phil ‘interview’ 28/05/2008) and this heightens the difficulty of pitching teacher development at a suitable level.

A final difficulty in the implementation of the above model is the expectations of teachers, like Ryan, whose experience has led him to expect a ‘teaching-by-numbers’ model of language teaching, in which teachers are given scripted lesson plans and materials from which to ‘teach’. This is the system used at organizations like Hess in Taiwan. Ryan says:

It’s mostly their fault [Phil and Leo] for not providing us with anything to do [in class]. … I care about what I’m going to go in and do the next week. I don’t care about some theory that Phil’s read last week and he thinks it’s really interesting, that I don’t care about, but I care about going in and doing my job properly. … I feel guilty when I go in and play games and stuff like that. I don’t feel like, ‘yeah, I got away with it’. … But basically that’s what I resort to, because they don’t give me anything so what else am I going to do? … The industry standard is to give us lesson plans every week. … Phil, Leo, the people that are supposed to be coming up with the program, giving us all this stuff … but I don’t know what the hell they do all day. Phil’s got this whole job where he gets paid twice as much as me to basically, to what? … I don’t see anything that he’s done that actually works for me.



This perception seems to be a result of mismatched expectations. Ryan’s notion of the ‘industry standard’ is doubtless based on his own teaching experience at Hess, but he alludes to a different model of teacher development to that of the CELTA-then-support model implicit at PSU.

Perhaps, given the teacher group at PSU, Ryan is right. The ‘broad palette of skills’ at PSU might indeed be better utilized by giving teachers a full set of lesson plans and materials from which they should not deviate. I instinctively reject this model of teaching as it relegates my profession to the status of a script that can be codified and learned; this is an extreme example of what Tudor (2001) describes as the ‘technological’ model. However, as the PSU context is reasonably uniform across several hundred comparable groups of students, and as the teachers willing to work in the role for the salary offered may not have sufficient ELT qualifications to allow them to be effective, perhaps the Hess model is better than the model currently in place.

At PSU, a prescriptive, reductive, teaching-by-numbers approach might be better than the current system, which assumes CELTA-then-support but which actually comprises teachers without CELTAs and a lack of support. This results in some teachers, like Mike, Dan, and Claire, trying to implement oral fluency development, while others, like Ollie and Karen, try to teach grammar. Still others, like Jon and Todd, rely on ‘fun’ games; and some, like Ryan and Beth, simply talk to their students. Perhaps, compared to this, a set of scripted lesson plans would allow for teachers to stay ‘on track’ if their purpose is actually to develop students’ English. However, this assumes that the role of teachers is to be effective, as understood by models 1 or 2. And as discussed in Chapter 8, teachers’ primary purpose at PSU might not be language teaching at all.

Perhaps, then, a prescriptive lesson ‘technology’ is only as useful as the personal qualities of the foreign teachers, who must ideally look and act the part constructed by Occidentalist notions of ‘Westernness’. At PSU, these qualities, and the ability to create the ‘right’ atmosphere’, are at least as important as what teachers actually teach. This suggests that a script-based solution akin to the Hess system would work only insofar as the people implementing it, who would not necessarily have any teaching qualification, had the right personal qualities. Ryan and Jon would likely do well; Dan and Ollie would likely struggle. This is similar to ‘staged authenticity’ in tourism, discussed in Chapter 3, in which the ascribed characteristics and very selves of tourism employees are commodified.

Why, then, does Phil try to get the PSU teachers interested in teaching? Why might he pitch teacher development workshops at a theoretical level beyond the teachers’ day-to-day classroom needs? The next section considers Phil’s optimism, and it begins with a metaphor about a rubber dinghy.

Phil’s idealism

Noodles with Leo today, after our interview. … He’d talked about Phil’s idealism, ‘so unrealistic’, ‘no idea what the teachers actually need’, etc. … I said I agree (and I do). Phil is a dreamer … Over lunch Leo wanted to ask


me something. … [He said] ‘Phil’s idealistic? But aren’t you much more idealistic? I mean, you’re writing a PhD on this’. [And I said,] ‘yeah, I’m idealistic. I think the PSU setup is like a crappy, leaky dinghy’. I say, ‘let’s get rid of the dinghy and get a cruise ship. Let’s be really idealistic. Let’s go to the uni and get them to give students more than just 80 min[ute]s a week for a year: that’s only 40 hours all up. Let’s get proper assessment. Let’s have classes of 15 max.’ … I want the cruise ship. But Phil goes, ‘we’ve got this crappy little dinghy, let’s paint it white, let’s put some deck chairs over here, let’s put up a sunshade’. [Then Phil] says, ‘hey, look everyone, we’ve got a cruise ship. But the teachers go, ‘naaa, it’s just a dinghy, we know, we work here’. … They don’t believe in it.

(Phiona ‘field notes’ 10/06/2009)

The metaphor of the rubber dinghy describes Phil’s idealism as I perceive it, and as many of the participants did. Karen commented:

Something that infuriates me about Phil is he’s a dreamer and I don’t know if he’s just bullshitting all this stuff. … Does he know that it’s never going to change no matter what he says? And when he talks he’s not speaking English, he’s speaking like, academic talk that no-one else is going to understand because it’s just airy words with no actual solid meaning to them. When he did his little talks me and Claire just looked at each other, like, ‘what the fuck is he trying to say?’ … There’s no ‘right, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that’. … You need a solid thing, a solid idea you’re going to grasp, and, ‘right, OK, I can do that in class’.


This is similar to Beth’s view:

There is a complete disconnect between what Phil says and what is done, and not just because we think Phil is a ridiculous idealist … I do really like Phil but we’ve had issues out at this particular university and Phil responds to that by not coming out here, even though he knew there were problems. Leo was, this year, a source of those problems, and instead of keeping an eye on it, instead of keeping on top of it; Phil just disappeared and wouldn’t come out [to PSU], which just created more problems. And so there’s a huge disconnect between what Phil says he believes and what he actually does. … He comes up with what sounds like an excellent idea but because he has no contact, daily contact with students or with the teachers, so he doesn’t know.


And Leo’s:

Some of the teachers, and the students, and the school are closer to each other [in what they want] than Phil is to any of them … My job is the buffer.


I tried to make the teachers happy and … keep the university happy, and the students’ evaluations are higher than ever. … So I commend Phil 100 percent for saying ‘enough is enough, I am going to make a decision, and lead this program the way I want it to be’. … Letting me go, that’s a tough decision [Phil dismissed Leo from PSU in June 2009]. I said to him, basically, ‘you are relieving me of this burden and you’re putting this burden on yourself. Whoever you’re going to hire, if he even fucks up a little bit ... the school’s going to go, ‘you let a DoS [Director of Studies] go that was’, from their perspective, ‘doing a great job. You let a DoS go that worked’. It’s going to all be on him. … [Phil and his wife have a] second kid on the way … Only an idealist would do that, would put himself at risk to realize his goals. … I wouldn’t make that decision. … Phil’ll get fired before he succeeds. If he pushes this, to the way he wants … [The university] will say, ‘I don’t really care, just make it work’.


Similarly, Dan said that Phil was ‘tilting at windmills’ in his pursuit of DELTA-style teacher development for the PSU teachers (Dan ‘interview’ 11/06/2009). To Dan, Phil is fighting the wrong, or imagined, enemies; the teachers do not need or want to develop as English language teachers. Instead, they want to do their jobs as well as they can while they are in China, and they would like Phil to give them the tools they perceive they need in order to do so.

Phil’s position can be theorized with reference to Vygotsky’s work on the zone of proximal development, or ZPD (Smidt 2009). While originally formulated to explain children’s supported learning, this model allows for an understanding of the PSU teachers’ development and Phil’s attempts to provide theoretically infused training. The issue is shown in Figure 10.2.

The teachers are currently operating in the centre circle. Their ZPD is the second circle, in which they might develop as teachers. However, Phil’s teacher training sessions seem to be pitched too far outside teachers’ ZPD (and also

Teachers’ abilities, skills, knowledges, etc.

Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development

Phil’s theory-based input based on his own DELTA-type needs, abilities, skills, knowledges, etc.

Figure 10.2 Vygotskyan analysis of teacher development at PSU


outside their area of interest, or, at least, Phil cannot spark their interest as the material seems irrelevant to their perceived needs). As a result, teachers stay within the centre circle, as they do not receive the required support, or ‘scaffolding’, that would allow them to move into the ZPD. Leo’s input at Wednesday teachers meetings also moves teachers no further into the ZPD but this is for the opposite reason to Phil; Leo is, himself, operating only in the centre circle (teachers’ zone of actual development).

All the participants cited in this section construct Phil as a dreamer or an idealist, but these labels conceal two distinct meanings. Phil both wishes things were otherwise (e.g. that the teachers were dedicated, career teachers interested in ‘academic talk’ about teaching) but also he hopes that by adjusting details of the PSU experience he can make things different. He is perhaps more accurately both an idealist and an optimist. Phil and I discussed his own idealism, and I told him about my dinghy analogy. He said:

Yeah, it sounds like me [laughs]. It’s idealism with what we’ve got … but without the rubber dinghy everyone would sink … it’s slightly better than a rubber dinghy, though, it’s like a tatty fishing boat [laughs].


The question of whether or not ‘everyone would sink’ without the dinghy of the PSU program is a tricky one. On the one hand, as it is the program seems to be doing more harm than good in its creation and perpetuation of negative stereotyping by both teachers and students. On the other hand, without the ‘dinghy’ as it currently exists (in which PSU employs ABC English, and Phil, to recruit teachers and manage the program), the situation might very well be worse. Many other Chinese universities advertise for foreign teachers without ELT qualifications and Yasper and Phil’s experiences of teaching in other Chinese universities indicate that oral English teachers elsewhere may not be able to count on systems such as lesson planning meetings, an organized syllabus, textbooks, and (albeit sporadic) classroom observations.

In some ways, Phil’s optimism about making the program as good as it can be is heartening. My own hope for an actual cruise ship-like program at PSU is perhaps unrealistic considering that oral English is not a core part of students’ courses and there are priorities well above expanding the oral English program, particularly given the likely difficulty in recruiting suitable teachers. So I have learned from Phil that it is important to dream about how things could be but also to improve how things actually are.

Phil says, ‘all you can do is set up where you’d want to work’ (Phil ‘interview’ 09/06/2009). However I am not sure that I would want to work at PSU. As discussed in Chapter 7, I felt demeaned as a teacher because I felt that at least part of my role was constructed as a stereotypically ‘foreign’ entertainer, part of whose role was seemingly to affirm Chinese superiority. Likewise, many of the teachers struggled with the identity negotiations inherent in working in the context. So although Phil’s optimism and idealism are inspiring in some ways, the fictions he


creates around teacher professionalism are part of the confusion the teachers experience at PSU. This is discussed in more detail in Chapter 11.

Conclusion

This chapter has shown that short ELT courses are poor preparation for teachers in this context because course outcomes and contextual needs do not match. Whereas CELTA-type courses stress language awareness and the ability to clarify and provide controlled and freer practice of target language points within a communicative framework, teachers’ needs in the context are primarily that teachers will perform ‘foreignness’, provide ‘fun’ lessons, and perhaps engage students in oral fluency practice provided that such activities are given face validity by seeming to be controlled practice of specific language points.

However, the outcomes of CELTA and the needs of teachers at PSU are not entirely mutually exclusive. The two constructs can be conceived as overlapping, with the main area of convergence in the provision of controlled practice of specific language points. This is an outcome of CELTA-type courses and it is also the basis of the PPP-based, sleight-of-hand strategy on which Wednesday lesson plans were based, at least initially. This should, therefore, be an area in which the teachers can be effective, and indeed some, such as Claire, Mike, and Dan, enjoyed some success with controlled-practice-like activities, even if only for the face validity that these confer on oral fluency development. However, these lesson types rely on there being a language clarification stage, if only to justify the subsequent practice, and this is where most of the teachers came unstuck. Although language clarification is, in theory, an outcome of short ELT courses, most of the participants perceived weakness in language awareness, and this was confirmed by observations. Without adequate support, and with the ‘language point’ marginalized both by the pressure to be ‘fun’ and by the dominant staffroom discourse of ‘killing 80 minutes’, the teachers moved away from this model, towards game playing as the central activity in oral English.

This move also meant that teachers moved away from the skills they had acquired on their short ELT courses, which would explain the issue of teachers de-skilling as a result of teaching in the context; this was described in Chapter 7. This is not to say that the teachers learn nothing from teaching at PSU. They may acquire ‘soft-focus’ skills in creating a harmonious classroom atmosphere and they may acquire knowledge about Chinese life and culture if they choose, like Beth and Ryan did, to go down a discussion-based route. But it is unsurprising that China-experienced teachers may encounter difficulty in the DELTA, as my DELTA-trainer friend suggested was her experience. If teachers’ experience is anything like that of the PSU teachers, they may forget the skills they learned on CELTA and may practise instead an entirely different teacher-centred, game-focused, largely aim-free teaching style.

11 Constructing and maintaining identities

In this chapter I turn to the second research question: how are teachers’ identities constructed and maintained in this context? The teachers are affected both by their pre-existing selves and also by their experiences in China, including the discourses of their colleagues and the wider contexts of PSU and Shanghai. For many, a sojourn spent teaching English in China is about China and the sojourn more than it is about English teaching. But this need not mean that they do not care about their work. In fact, all claimed and evidenced at least some teaching-related motivation. However, their motivations changed over time. By interviewing the same people over several years, I was able to track some changes in their morale and in their identities as these relate to their work, and this chapter discusses the teachers’ developing identities.

As discussed, there are myriad tensions and uncertainties in the teachers’ role, and the incumbents are inadequately prepared by short-course training for the skills they actually need in the context. The work, although not English language teaching per se, is exhausting and perhaps demoralizing. To please students, foreign teachers need a complex set of skills including a larger-than-life, ‘bubbly’ classroom persona, game-playing/entertainment skills, and the ability to manage the ‘soft-focus’ of classroom dynamics that create a harmonious atmosphere. In addition, they need a certain amount of China knowledge and humility, an ability to perform stereotypical ‘foreignness’, and some willingness to be ridiculed as ‘foreign idiots’. This is comparable to the ‘deep acting of emotional labour’ (Crang 1997: 148) of tourism performances, in which ‘employees’ selves become part of the product … their personhood is commodified’ (ibid.: 153). Although not ELT, the foreign teacher role is not easy. This is particularly true for those who had appropriated an identity of themselves as teachers and/or had a desire to develop professionally; those who tried to ‘teach properly’, as defined on short ELT courses, seemed to suffer most.

However, and perhaps in self-defence, most of the participants constructed the role at PSU as somewhat laughable, and the context as the site of their own working holiday. This led to professional and emotional struggles. Participants’ sensemaking centred on belittling the role, the institution, and China, while trying to understand why they could not easily succeed despite the apparent simplicity of their task. They employed various strategies for dealing with this


discord, including appropriating non-ELT identities and expressing frustrations that were sometimes quite shocking examples of imagined cultural superiority.

Karen’s story: Mixed and changing motivations

Most of the teachers’ motivations changed during their time at PSU, and Karen’s story best illustrates such transitions. Here she explains her initial motivations:

I really want to be a secondary school English teacher. And I applied [for a graduate-entry teaching degree]… but I didn’t get in because it’s so competitive. … So I wanted to get some experience and I didn’t want to be a teaching assistant. … I’d been in Bristol for too long and I was getting stale, I wanted to get out, and my dad said, ‘you’ve never been travelling, you can’t really afford to go travelling so why don’t you go and teach abroad?’


To re-use Ryan’s framework from Chapter 8, Karen’s motivations are a combination of ‘running towards’ teaching experience and overseas experience, but also ‘running away’ from ‘getting stale’. Her use of ‘while I’m out here’ is indicative of her construction of her time in China as temporary.

However, interviewed again in June 2008, Karen describes how her motivation as a teacher had changed throughout the 2007–2008 academic year:

I really enjoy working here, but I’ve got to be honest I don’t really see this [working at PSU] as, like, a job, job. … My other job [teaching in a language school in the UK] I really thought of as a job … and this is my career and I’m doing something and it’s helping me towards what I want to do in the future. … In my other job, and in every job I’ve had … I would never go into my job hungover, ever. I would never think of going out and getting lashed the night before and yet people here do. … And maybe it’s because … we’re out in a different country, I don’t know, this is my first job abroad, I don’t know what other jobs abroad are like, but I do feel I’m back as a [university] student again out here. … You can get away with more or less anything. Which I don’t necessarily think is a good thing. … I really do care about my students and so I wouldn’t want to stay here for longer than a year, maybe because I think that if I did this next year and I carried on, I don’t think I’d care as much.


Although Karen says she enjoys the holiday-like nature she perceives of her job at PSU, this does not appear to be an attitude she brought with her. Rather, Karen’s construction of oral English teaching as a holiday job is attributable to her experience of the job itself and the work culture at PSU.

A year later, in June 2009, I re-interviewed Karen. By this time she was teaching at another Shanghai university in a job that also comprised working part time as

Constructing and maintaining identities 211

a Marketing Assistant charged with marketing the university’s courses to English-speaking overseas students. She explained her feelings towards teaching English:

I’m really glad I’ve got my marketing [role]. … I hate teaching, I literally hate that feeling in the morning when you’re really tired and you don’t really feel like it and you have to go in, and everyone’s staring at you, expecting something. … I look at [other foreign teachers] around me here … they’re just teaching here. In my eyes they’re not doing anything, and it scares me to think that I’m going to be like that. … If you really like teaching, fine, but you should progress up [into academic management] … there’s no point in just staying teaching English classes. … Speaking to people who hate teaching but they’re still doing it, they’re stuck, they’ve woken me up to it because I realize that if you stay in it too long then that’s it, it’s all you can do. … I went back [to the UK, in mid 2008] and that really scared me, I couldn’t get a job. No-one wanted me, even office jobs that weren’t very good money.


In the same interview, Karen explained her perception of the diminishing capital value of transnational experience in the UK:

When I’m in China, my [UK] friends are on Facebook and they’re like, ‘wow, you’re in China’, that’s so cool. And I go back to Britain and I’m just another Brit. In Britain you’re nothing. ... There’s only so many times you can say to people, ‘I’ve just left China’, no-one wants to hear it forever, you can’t put a sign on your head. … But if you’re a foreigner in a different country … you always have the ‘where are you from?’ … If I went back to Britain I’d just be bored again, bored and boring. … I don’t want to go back to being who I was.


Karen’s motivation has therefore changed. Her experiences of teaching in Shanghai seems to have influenced her changing attitude towards ELT in China, first framing it as a useful way to acquire capital that will benefit her in the future in the UK and later framing it as detrimental to her subsequent career and to her identity. And she now values transnational capital less for what it can do for her in the UK, where its value seems to be transitory, but for what it symbolizes in China. Karen’s story illustrates her changing purposes and a gradual disillusionment with ELT in the context. However, as Karen suggests, transnational capital may be a powerful motivating factor for those participants who plan to stay in China. This describes Ollie and Ryan.

Teachers’ motivations: Staying in China

Ollie expressed various different motivations, including a desire to develop as a teacher. But his main motivation appears to be the capital attributed to him as a


foreign resident in Shanghai. Here he candidly explains how living in China has endowed him with the cultural capital of being transnational:

To be honest, when you’re over here people like you, generally, because you’re a foreigner, so it’s an egotistical thing, but I like that. Over there [in the UK] I’m nothing, but over here people want to know me. … [Being in Shanghai] kind of makes me feel a little bit more special … So I’m happier being here than I am there. … It’s enabled me to do things that I’ve really wanted to do which I could never do in England … for example, I meet business people and I can be on the same level as them … and be friends with a wider bunch of people … in London there’s that gap: ‘I’m a manager, you can’t talk to me’. But here we’re all foreigners. It doesn’t matter how much money you earn, we’re on the same level.


Ryan’s case is different from Ollie’s, at least in the way Ryan and Ollie themselves frame it. Describing his initial motivation, using his binary ‘running towards’ and ‘running away’ framework, Ryan says he was ‘motivated by getting out of Canada … seeing more of the world, broaden[ing] my horizons, [and] see[ing] different things.’ (Ryan ‘interview’ 28/05/2009). Within this, Ryan explains his understanding of teachers’ motivations in general:

RYAN: The whole purpose of taking a CELTA is to get your butt out of Canada and go overseas. It’s not because you’re really interested in [language teaching]. I don’t think anyone sits and goes, ‘I want to be an English teacher’. … No-one would go to university and, I don’t think they even have university programs that are about, like, TEFL.

PHIONA: Yeah, they do.RYAN: They do? They’re small then, no-one would ever [do those programs].

… How good can it be? It’s just English teaching. … Essentially it all boils down to talking to a bunch of kids.


Throughout this study, Ryan has consistently claimed that he has no interest in developing as a teacher, and that teaching is simply the ‘grunt work’ he has to do to live in China. Perhaps because of this, Ryan consistently describes ELT as unskilled labour. His stated lack of any teaching motivation is a powerful influence in the staffroom as it affects the professionalism that other teachers perceive of the work culture. Karen explains:

I think that the atmosphere here isn’t very professional, so it makes you think like, ‘oh, well whatever’. … Ryan was talking about his way of getting through [his teaching], of mainly going in stoned [having smoked marijuana]. … Ryan just doesn’t care, which, when I first talked to him, when I first met him, I thought, ‘oh god you must be an awful teacher’, but … I think, pretty


much, he’s got it sussed, the perfect way to teach in China is to be constantly stoned and not care but just enjoy it for what it is.


Phil, Leo, and Dan expressed frustration with Ryan’s attitude to his work and his self-appointed role as a ‘trade union leader’ (Phil ‘interview’ 09/06/2009) and his ‘bitching and moaning’ about PSU (Dan ‘interview’ 10/06/2009). One of the PSU teachers, on condition of anonymity, described Ryan as a ‘toxic puppet-master’. Ryan himself comments on his ‘bad attitude’ at work:

Yeah, it’s true [laughs]. … The job’s really monotonous and boring. I’ve smoked a ton of dope this past two years, right? And, like, that, kind of affects my moods, puts me on edge a little bit. … You’d think it would chill me out but it’s complete frustration as well. ... There’s so much down time [at work] … I just do stupid shit here. … It’s very patronizing, having to listen to Leo, it makes me want to point out how stupid he is [laughs]. … I think I have a massive problem with authority as well.


Ryan, it seems, does care about his students and his identity as a teacher, whatever he may say about being wholly instrumentally motivated. As he explained in Chapter 7, Ryan feigns indifference because ‘if you care you’re vulnerable’. But this position seems to have taken its toll, and Ryan explains his workplace frustration and his perception of mistaken attributed identity:

At PSU you spend a lot of time doing nothing and you see your days just being wasted away. … I’ve felt that I’m really not doing anything. My idea, when I left Taiwan, was to come over to [mainland] China and use my Chinese [language skills] to get into a better career. But when I came over here I was stuck with the identity of being a teacher … I don’t want to be an English teacher anymore … but this is the easiest thing for me to do, right, that’s why I’m an English teacher … I don’t hate being an English teacher but I think I’m capable of more. I would hate to have my life pass me by and be like, 40 years old and be an English teacher and go, like, ‘I wanted to do so much more’.


Ryan’s frustration, particularly as it is articulately and frequently expressed, may influence the other teachers’ perceptions of their work at PSU and of the ELT profession more widely. This is discussed in the next section.

Karen’s story: ‘Trapped’ in ELT

Of all the participants, Karen appears to be most acutely aware of the problem Ryan is describing. Of Ryan himself, she comments:


What kind of life is that? You’re constantly stoned to get through life? … I’m happy that Ryan’s going off to [study at] university now because he needs to snap himself out of that [way of life]. … When I look at Ryan it really wakes me up.


Karen’s description of Ryan’s way of life as something that he needs to ‘snap out of’ is something she generalizes to her own and other teachers’ experiences:

I miss working at PSU because it was such a joke; I miss the party atmosphere. ... But the difference is you can’t choose to stay in university for the rest of your life, but you can choose to stay on [at PSU], and people do. … It’s a complete bubble there. … I’d love to live like that again, have loads of free time, go out … it’s fun. But everyone’s got to grow up sooner or later. ... I feel like I’m more of an adult than before and I respect myself more now.


Throughout her 2009 interviews, Karen described English teaching as a ‘joke’, and she harshly judges careers in ELT. Of Leo, she says:

I don’t understand him, he could progress but he doesn’t seem to want to. … All Leo has to do is take himself a little more seriously. … He’s, like, 30, and he’s not one of the boys anymore, he’s not 22 or whatever. ... He’s got this opportunity, he’s the DoS [Director of Studies], he should do a bit more with it. ... He seems to be quite happy staying with what he’s doing, which seems like a waste because … if he bucked up his act a little bit, he could progress. … I wouldn’t want to always stay doing the same thing … I would be really disappointed in myself if I did.


Similarly, she frames Dan’s desire to make a career in teaching as ‘floating’:

I don’t want to be like Dan, he’s like, what, 40, 45 or something and he’s still just teaching. … Dan is just a teacher and I personally … I’d be really disappointed with myself if I was that age and still floating.


Asked for more detail on this understanding of ELT as something from which one must escape, Karen explains her perception:

You teach [overseas] for one year and it’s good, it’s exciting, it’s something different. You teach for two years, it’s going to be very difficult to get a job [other than ELT]. But then, after two years and you can’t get another job, then what do you do? You’re trapped. You give up looking and trying for


something different, you lose your will to progress. … Every day I see and hear of foreigners trying to get themselves out of teaching. … Teaching is a rut.


English language teaching at PSU is thus being constructed as the preserve of those who are motivated by spending time in China rather than a role from which a teaching career might be built; it is a low level job fit only for those who are yet to escape into something better.

Foreign teachers as irrelevant

As discussed in Chapter 8, the participants variously perceived that they are constructed by circumstances and by their students as ‘babysitters’ (Leo, Ryan), animals in a petting zoo (Dan), and ‘not just interchangeable but completely disposable’ (Beth). This would contribute to the low-status identities attributed to foreign teachers working as ordinary teachers at PSU. This section illustrates the identity effects that these perceptions have on the teachers themselves.

One way in which the teachers feel their work is disregarded is in students’ assessments. Ryan describes an incident in which he had given a weak student low marks for oral English:

I flip through the [marks sheets] and when we get to his I notice that the marks I had given have been scribbled out and … [much better] grades have been written in. I looked at Qing [the office administrator] and said that I didn’t give him these marks. … [Qing said] ‘Well, you see, his dad is a Party member.’ [And I said] ‘Qing, are you changing the marks I give the students behind my back?’

(Ryan ‘e-mail’ 10/06/2008)

As Qing is not an English teacher, her overturning of the student’s marks undermines the oral English teachers’ ostensible role in student assessment. Ryan continues:

I didn’t know how to go about arguing this. I knew that this kid’s guanxi [connections] would trump any authority I have. … I felt frustrated and angry, mostly disrespected and belittled. To change my marks like that, without even consulting me; how am I supposed to believe that this job is more than just a babysitter for overgrown children, when I’m not allocated the respect of a teacher? … I just found it all extremely disrespectful to my position and myself.

(Ryan ‘e-mail’ 10/06/2008)

That Ryan, of all participants, feels angry, disrespected, and belittled when he professes not to be motivated as a teacher perhaps indicates the lack of professional respect the foreign teachers at PSU are given. Interestingly, he also uses the


situation to infantilize his students, perhaps as a defence to his perceived belittling. This motive for infantilizing was discussed in Chapter 8. Of course, though, this issue is circular. Ryan is unqualified as an English language teacher, he professes not to care about teaching, he goes into class having smoked marijuana, and he tells his students funny stories about his travels; Ryan’s is not a convincing case for respecting foreign teachers.

But Dan is. Unlike Ryan, Dan consistently evidenced motivation for, and effort applied to, developing as a teacher, addressing his students’ needs, finding activities that would be both well received and aims-driven, and building a career in ELT. But Dan also expressed his frustration at the way the students are assessed. Here, for example, he compares the relative weightings of students’ speaking exams, in the last two weeks of each semester, with the on-going assessment throughout the course:

The killer, the big thing was [Phil and Leo said], ‘oh, we finally changed the grading system, the final is not worth such a big chunk anymore’. Bullshit. They lied to us, they fucking lied to us, to our faces. Last night, typing in, on the Excel sheet, I realized [that] when you type the numbers in you can see the formula. The final is worth 70 percent of the final grade. They fucking lied to us, Leo and Phil. They made a big deal about, ‘finally, it’s not like the final is the only thing that matters, their performance in class over the course of the year matters’. Bullshit. It’s 70 percent on the final, that’s what the formula says on the grade sheet. And I saw that last night and just, I got up, took a breath, had a cigarette, sat down, and thought, ‘just finish your grading, cut and paste the comments, turn these things in, and walk away from this place, and never come back’. I almost want to scream at Phil. I almost want to call him a fucking liar. And I never want to get mad at Phil. But that just tore it. It’s like another damn thing. And I almost want to mention it to other people but it’s like, I don’t want to hear it [their responses] because they’ll just well up with all their, ‘ah, you see, it’s all a bunch of bullshit’. But right now I feel like I’ve been the idiot. … I hate feeling this way. It’s affecting my view of teaching. It’s not been a healthy place to be.


This lived experience has clearly affected Dan, who acknowledged his own ‘bitterness and cynicism’ as a result of these experiences. It may also be affecting his health; Dan describes an incident that affected him in late 2008:

I had a medical emergency on Friday that no one knows what is was, or what caused it, and can’t find a trace of it in my CAT scan – best preliminary guess is a very minor stroke.

(Dan ‘e-mail’ 21/12/2008)

While this incident may not be stress-related, and was eventually diagnosed as ‘not a stroke’ (Dan ‘e-mail’ 05/10/2009), Dan’s view in interviews was that his


working life at PSU certainly did not benefit his mental and physical health. Dan may be particularly susceptible to stress as he perhaps has the most to lose. He perceives he has chosen to live and work in Asia permanently rather than taking a temporary sojourn as a teacher. This means he cannot compartmentalize his time in China as quite separate from his ‘real’ life, as some participants do.

This difference between teachers’ norms and contextual realities is not problematized except with platitudes, from Leo, like, ‘this is China, man’ (Ryan ‘interview’ 10/06/2009). So Ryan and other participants perceive tension between two constructs. The first of these is their pre-existing habitus about teachers’ roles. This is reinforced at PSU by Phil’s idealistic professional development discourse and by expectations that the foreign teachers will behave professionally. The second construct is the role as it is constructed by events and circumstances, in which the foreign teachers’ work, including fair grading, appears to be irrelevant. This is the cause of some of the frustrations the teachers experience at PSU. By not problematizing this discord, and instead maintaining the fiction of professional teachers, Phil loses legitimacy.

Ryan explains his perception of the fiction of professionalism:

How am I supposed to take this job seriously when stuff like this happens [the changing of the student’s marks] and is handled in such a way as to blow me off and sweep me under the rug? … I’ve gone through numerous workshops on marking final exams for the specific purpose of making sure that my marking is in line with everyone else’s. How am I supposed to take these workshops seriously if our impartiality is wavered in the end by someone else’s partiality?

(Ryan ‘e-mail’ 10/06/2008)

Ryan’s critique of Phil and Leo is fairly typical of his articulate, often bitter, discourse. Phil commented that in the 2008–2009 academic year Ryan had become ‘unmanageable’, and that his low morale and ‘poisonous influence’ had made a ‘vipers’ nest’ of the PSU staffroom. Of course, Ryan alone could not achieve this. Other teachers, including Beth, also perceive inconsistency between the ‘professional’ teacher role that Phil tries to construct and the ‘irrelevant’ role of not-quite-teachers that they experience through incidents such as these. These critiques are destructive, but they do suggest that the participants care about their own identities as teachers more than they might let on. If they were truly instrumentally motivated, the feeling that their jobs were irrelevant might not seem problematic.

Appropriating other identities

As discussed in Chapter 9, some teachers, such as Jon, solve this problem by framing their time in China as ‘adventures’ distinct from their ‘real’ lives. Others, like Dan, self-flagellate over their own perceived inability to be ‘effective’. And still others, like Ryan and Beth, appropriate other identities as a way of safeguarding


themselves from the feeling of failing at something that they understand as unskilled work. These other identities are discussed in this section.

Ryan self-identifies as a China Hand and a ‘traveller’ rather than a teacher. This can be theorized as the acquisition of cultural capital (e.g. fluency in Chinese) and the symbolic capital of being well travelled and China-savvy. Asked about these forms of capital, Ryan says:

I’ve hung onto that. [When I travelled around Asia in summers of 2007 and 2008] I don’t think there was a conversation with another traveller where I didn’t bring up the fact that I can speak Chinese … It’s like I didn’t just travel, I’ve lived here. … I had this feeling that they [other travellers] were all looking at me like I was the super traveller, like, I’ve been in China for a long time, I can speak the language. … I came across as this total hardcore traveller.


Ryan explains the transnational identity with which he is associated in China, comparing it to his identity in Canada:

Here, I’m an internationality … it’s a totally different way of thinking from the people back home. … I remember when I went out with my girlfriend and one of her friends, and her friend’s boyfriend was from Jordan and when we were talking about how things are ‘back home’. You catch yourself saying ‘back home’. … I’m like, ‘you’re not from where I’m from’, but he studied in France, so … he’s an internationality like me. … The world’s getting smaller you’re starting to get this subculture of people, who are, like, internationalists [i.e. transnationals]. … [Compared to who I was in Canada] I’m just not that person anymore, I don’t feel like I am.


Ryan also attributed this motivation to Ollie, using both his own and Ollie’s case as examples of the way individuals’ attributed identities may differ, with the capital of transnationalism valued differently at home and abroad:

Ollie, he’s a dweeb [i.e. a loser] back home and he comes over here and he’s still a dweeb … but he’s looked at differently, his identity’s changed because here he is an international citizen, he is a foreigner. … So that’s how the Chinese people look at him.


So Karen, Ollie, and Ryan agree that they enjoy a status in China that they do not have at home. For Karen, who says she plans to leave China, this difference in attributed status is described as a negative; for Ollie and Ryan, who plan to stay in China, transnationalism is framed as a positive.

Another non-ELT identity is appropriated by Beth, who takes refuge in the enacted identity of a teacher of anthropology; this is much closer to Beth’s


academic background than the teaching of oral English. She explains the process of choosing to appropriate this identity:

Being a foreign clown, that’s what I was confronted with. … It was just sick-making. I realized that unless I changed something I couldn’t do this again. … The game route would have been easier but it just caused me pain to have a completely meaningless life. … I’ve done meaningless jobs … but this is closer to what I want to do with my life, so I wanted to do a good job.


Like Ryan, Beth appropriates a different identity because the constructed role of an oral English teacher at PSU is too far removed from her appropriated identity for her to feel professionally comfortable, particularly as she identifies as a professional educator in a different field. Luckily for Beth, the clearing in the woods of the teacher role at PSU is sufficiently extensive and ill defined that it accommodates this shift. This is because both the traveller and the anthropologist enacted identities, appropriated by Ryan and Beth respectively, fit within students’ construction of the role of foreign teachers.

Frustrations and notions of superiority

This is different from Dan’s attempt to be a ‘serious’ English language teacher, as understood and constructed by short ELT courses. Aims-driven, communication-focused English language teaching lies outside of students’ constructions of the foreign teacher role, and they resist. Unlike Beth and Ryan, however, Dan does not choose to appropriate a different identity. Instead, he responds by getting angry, blaming himself and the situation, and ‘brooding’ about how to become a better teacher. Ultimately he concludes that the only way to be effective is to go elsewhere, and so he leaves PSU.

Todd, mentioned by several participants, appears to be handling his experience in a similar way, by directing anger towards the situation. Ryan explains his perception of Todd:

He hates Chinese people. You’ll see him, like, if you walk around with him on the streets he’s always yelling at people in the streets and stuff like that. … He’s like [addressing a young woman in the street] ‘walk in a straight line, yi zhi zou’ and he just freaked this girl out. He was right behind this Chinese girl walking down the street with her earphones on, like, this big Westerner is like, ‘move it, come on’. … I’m really curious about that, right, because it’s like where does he think he’s coming from? … But how much has he been pushed into his own uselessness by the job?


This is consistent with other participants’ descriptions of Todd (and my own more limited observation). But Todd’s case serves only as an example of a phenomenon


within the participant teachers’ milieu rather than as an emic case study in and of itself. This is because Todd has not responded to these observations and so it is unfair to take participants’ descriptions as wholly true. But Ryan’s comment that Todd has been ‘pushed into his own uselessness’ is intriguing. One source of the teachers’ frustrations seems to be a mismatch between their own identity perceptions and their professional role as it is constructed and attributed to them.

Todd’s presence, sensemaking, and behaviour also appear to be indicative of participants’ responses to their environment more generally. Many expressed frustrations with their work at PSU and with managing the ‘culture shock’ of living in Shanghai. This culture shock sometimes spills over into anti-Chinese sentiments, particularly among teachers, like Todd, whose Chinese language skills are weak. Sam gives an example of his own out-of-class frustrations:

The endless stares. People trying to short change you all the time (we’re [W]hite, so what is 4 mao [6 cents] to us). People not sitting next to us on buses because we are [W]hite. People being awkward. I went to buy some DELTA books at the Foreign Language Bookstore. [They had] none, the lady said. [But] there they were, upstairs, so I went back down when I had bought them and scared the shit out of her. I haven’t been that angry in years, and the security guards didn’t know what to do. I swore at the unhelpful, and what I consider to be racist, girl for a few minutes, everyone watching and scared. What do I care? I’m not going to see her again.

(Sam ‘e-mail’ 26/06/2009)

As discussed, the participants have been attributed, and may also appropriate, a limited professional identity due to the notion that foreign teachers are ‘fun’ but not serious. Most appear to feel uncomfortable with this idea and it is the source of some of their frustrations. Sam’s case also suggests that the teachers’ experiences may compound, and be compounded by, culture shock.

Phil attributes the cause to a mismatch between identity and role but critiques the teachers for misunderstanding their role and underestimating the importance of Chinese discourses in the context:

[They are] disappointed that their ‘China adventure’, which was about individualism and adventure for them, and [about] ‘giving’ the Chinese their ‘Westernness’ has been co-opted into a system in which the primacy of the individual is much diluted. Is it shocking to the would-be cultural imperialist to find themselves in a place that may well represent and define the future better than where they come from?

(Phil ‘e-mail’ 19/06/2009)

To me, Phil is right but rather harsh. There is a parallel, much more powerful, Chinese discourse at work in the context, and it takes precedence over both the ‘voluntourism’ and ‘teach and travel’ discourses, to which the teachers implicitly subscribe. As a result, they find themselves treated less as heroes ‘helping’ China


than as puppets made to dance to Chinese tunes. They resist. I do not mean to say that their discourses (the White man’s burden in ‘helping’ China or foreigners’ right to run amok in China to their own ends) are necessarily legitimate; as discussed in Chapter 2 and 3, they are problematically neo-colonial. But they are the discourses in which the teachers are embedded and so it is understandably difficult for them to adapt to a role borne not of their own discourses, but of China’s. In adapting, and in acknowledging their own relative powerlessness, they experience the discomfort of identity dissonance.

As a result, notions of superiority may still prevail among the teacher group. Sam exemplifies this in an e-mail in which he laments the way ‘serious’ teachers are not sufficiently appreciated:

[T]here are lots of customers out there who want to learn English and it appears that if they want our expertise then their school education systems in their home countries are failing them. I won’t hide [having been an English teacher here] on my CV. I am proud of it and will simply be leaving China in a week to go and be appreciated somewhere else.

(Sam ‘e-mail’ 26/06/2009)

Sam’s e-mail constructs Chinese ELT as inferior to Western models, and minimally ELT trained native English speakers as something China should ‘appreciate’. While these constructions embed a sense of superiority, this is perhaps unsurprising given that Sam had just spent a year being held up as a ‘foreign expert’ and something of a ‘superhero’ in an educational system in which students demand nothing more (or less) than ‘fun’ teaching.

There is a circle of cause and effect here: while teachers’ notions of their own superiority may be latent, professional and intercultural frustrations they experience in the context, including a sense of being ‘pushed into their own uselessness’ by the role, may cause them to express sentiments that they would normally conceal. This, in turn, may cause them to question their own identity, particularly if the picture they see of themselves is of a White racist.

Conclusion

This chapter has answered my second research question, which asked how teachers’ identities are constructed and maintained in the context. Most of the participants have experienced frustrations because of the discursive and contextual construction of their professional roles and because of the more general challenges of living in a culture other than their own. These frustrations are variously directed inward or outward, affecting their identities in different ways. Dan’s becomes self-flagellation, health issues, and a decision to leave China. Todd and Sam’s frustrations result in shouting at strangers in streets and bookshops. Karen’s frustrations manifest as a desperation to escape ELT. Any of these may be damaging to the teachers themselves. And this type of frustration would likely also cause Chinese people to negatively evaluate the Westerners in their midst.


An alternative outlet for role frustrations, described above, is to appropriate other identities –Beth’s culture teaching or Karen’s move into marketing, for example– and a general disrespect for ELT as a profession. This is part of the cause of ELT’s ‘image problem’ that Val described in Chapter 8. Ryan appears to channel his frustrations most productively, with an investment in his own acquisition of ‘China capital’. This, in turn, results in some meaningful conversations with his students. But Ryan’s voice is also central to the teachers’ destructive critique of their context, and he uses his China knowledge to lend legitimacy to much of its veiled neo-colonialism. This results in some teachers leaving China with pre-existing notions of their own superiority intact. Thus, rather than increasing teachers’ intercultural competence, the PSU experience may serve to build and reinforce negative Othering.

12 Recommendations and reflections

This chapter examines the implications of this study and makes suggestions for future research. The most immediately obvious area for further investigation is to determine the extent to which this situation is similar to ELT in other contexts. Conference audiences have told me both that my participants’ experiences are ‘exactly the same’ in Korea, Japan, Indonesia, or Thailand but also that ‘it’s completely different’ in better universities or for teachers of tangible ‘content’ subjects. So one area in which further research is immediately suggested is a comparative study of other teaching contexts in China and elsewhere.

Understandings about the teachers’ working lives are important for two reasons. Firstly, untold thousands of foreign teachers currently work in China and little has hitherto been known about their lived experiences. Secondly, international migration is at its highest level ever: one in every thirty five people lives outside of his or her country of origin (United Nations Global Commission on International Migration 2005). Although some research has focused at either end of this phenomenon, on transnational elites and unskilled workers, little is known about middle-ground transnationals. This study therefore contributes to knowledge in this area, exploring, as it has, the way capital is used but also acquired by transnational people in this context.

But as transnationalism transforms capital it also transforms individuals. So this is also a study of identity negotiation. None of the participants is unaffected by their time in China, for better or worse, and although the longer-term impacts of their experience are unknowable, this chapter presents data from a revisiting of most of the participants in 2011, almost four years after the first interviews and observations in Shanghai in 2007. These provide intriguing clues as to how a period spent teaching oral English at PSU might affect teachers as individuals. This is only a preliminary glimpse at the experiences of a few people, however, and another suggestion for further research is a study of the longer-term effects of transnational experiences on returned middle-ground expatriates like these teachers.

Riding a donkey to go looking for a horse

The current situation at PSU is a single frame in China’s rapidly moving educational, political, and social footage. The section title is a Chinese idiom,


qi lü zhao ma, which means an interim measure. It is my suggestion that the current reality will not remain current for long, and that it will give way to different, hopefully better, circumstances. Péter Medgyes (cited by Bolitho and Medgyes 2000: 382) describes the situation in the early 1990s in Hungary, for instance, in which entirely ELT-unqualified native speaker ‘backpackers’ used to be employed as language teachers; that situation has now changed. Similarly, I believe, the situation at PSU will change. It is already different from how it was when I started my fieldwork in 2007; Leo is gone, the assessment system has changed, and more women teachers are now employed. Nevertheless, it would be fascinating to study a new cohort of teachers in a similar context in a follow-up study.

Change moves fast in Shanghai. The global financial crisis, although less damaging in China that many other countries, seems to have squeezed Shanghai’s already tight graduate job market (China Daily 2009), which increasingly demands graduates who can apply their learning to practical situations rather than those who can excel only in academic assessments (J. Chen 2008). Multinational companies recruiting Chinese graduates also complain about those who have passed English exams but are unable to use the language (Farrell and Grant 2005). So I envisage that the days are numbered for the current reality of teaching English ‘in theory’ and then trying to patch up the ensuing gaps in students’ competencies through the fun and games of ‘oral English’.

The present situation serves no one. Communicatively competent local teachers are spread too thinly, feeding examination content to large classes of mixed ability students motivated primarily by passing examinations that do not test their ability to use English holistically and meaningfully. Academics teaching non-English subjects complain that their students are distracted by English examinations that occupy nearly half of students’ university study time (Jiang 2003; Liu 2006; Xie 2004). Students themselves spend time, money, and effort acquiring discrete language items and test-taking skills to pass CET examinations. But then employers complain that graduates are inadequately skilled in their discipline areas and in general graduate qualities such as creativity, and are insufficiently able to use English (J. Chen 2008; Farrell and Grant 2005; Liu 2006). Into this milieu come minimally trained foreign teachers who do little but play games. This situation serves to establish and entrench Occidentalism of foreign Others while it denies those students who are keen to practise their English sufficient contact with their ‘foreign friends’. This situation is akin to an exhausted old donkey long overdue for replacement with a horse.

Three possible avenues for strategic change are open to Chinese educational planners. First, they could seek to remedy the inert knowledge problem in which students spend many years learning English only to struggle to use it. This would involve investing heavily in suitably qualified English teachers, whether local or foreign, and testing communicative rather than linguistic competence in CET-type examinations so as to create positive backwash on teaching and learning. A second solution would be to shift the emphasis away from English learning altogether, and instead focus on teaching students knowledge and skills more

Recommendations and reflections 225

closely related to their discipline of study. A third, combined, approach might seek to match skills to needs. Students of disciplines deemed to require a communicative command of English (tourism, international commerce, and so on) could undertake communication-focused English language learning while students in other disciplines, for which English is more tangentially related, might not learn English at all in tertiary education except perhaps as optional elective courses. Examinations would have to test holistic language use in order to utilize backwash as a motivator. This would allow existing ELT resources, particularly able local teachers but also the most competent of the foreign teachers, to be deployed where the need is greatest. This would go some way to solving the problem of unmotivated students struggling to perceive a need for English.

At the same time, CELTA-type courses would do well to re-consider the workplace needs of course graduates. As discussed in Chapter 10, CELTA’s de facto focus is on developing trainees’ explicit knowledge about language and their ability to provide clarification and practice of discrete language items in classes aimed at communicative competence development. But in many contexts, adult students undergo years of language-focused teaching in school before they encounter CELTA-trained teachers, in the hope of ‘installing’ their ‘downloaded’ (but inert) English. CELTA would therefore do well to accommodate this issue by training teachers in other areas, such as how to develop students’ macro skills and intercultural competence from a basis of declarative language knowledge, how to adapt classroom teaching to different cultures of learning, and how to create non-threatening classroom affect in which students feel motivated and supported. In order to do this, it is likely necessary to abandon the notion that one single CELTA course can hope to address the needs of graduates who will teach all over the world. Thus it may be necessary to create different course versions and/or context-specific add-on segments.

But these are not issues that can be solved at the level of a single Chinese university. And these solutions do not necessarily solve the problem of foreign teachers being held up as examples of the foreign Other, in the hope that by interacting with them students might acquire skills in ‘dealing with foreigners’.

At the PSU level, what can be done? Phil tried hard to employ and support foreign teachers that would be considered ‘qualified’ elsewhere; this certainly seems to be an improvement on the recruitment strategies of some other Chinese universities that employ foreign English teachers with no ELT training or experience (Mantle and Li 2006) and provide little or no guidance as to what they might do in oral English lessons (Mavrides 2008). But Phil is, to date, one of the few ‘qualified’ foreign teachers in the University Cooperation program, which recruits and manages foreign teachers at ten universities in Shanghai. And, as this study has shown, short-course ELT qualifications do not confer the skills that foreign teachers actually need in the context. Phil therefore faces an enormous task, to help his teachers bridge the gap between training outcomes and the demands made of them at PSU. To a great extent, he does not succeed in this task, mainly because he is based off site, because he pitches much of the teacher development workshops above teachers’ developmental level and outside their


area of interest, and because he is perceived to be idealistic and remote. As an immediate improvement, then, PSU might insist on the employment of an on-site Director of Studies whose qualifications and experience match those of Phil rather than those of Leo. This locally situated academic manager might be better able to discern and address teachers’ needs.

As for the program itself, a clear job description needs to be defined so as to clarify the teachers’ purpose. Within this, the current model of teachers cooperatively planning a single lesson to be repeated throughout the week is ineffective. This is because the teachers, at least with the current level of support, seem unable to plan a lesson that is both aims-driven, as the teachers understand this, and also acceptable to students, as the students understand the purpose and nature of oral English. Clarifying the purpose of oral English would help, as would making its purpose clearer to students. Of course, students and foreign teachers may still be unmotivated, particularly as the assessment structure marginalizes the role of oral English. To solve this, PSU needs to decide between making oral English both compulsory and of tangible importance to assessment, or making it optional for students. Either path would improve students’ in-class motivation to learn.

A further change, already underway by 2009, would be a conscious policy of hiring at least equal numbers of men and women teachers. This would go some way to reducing the ‘boys club’ discourse, within which much of the destructive, misogynistic behaviour takes place at PSU. Enforcing the stated policy of dismissing teachers who involve themselves in sexual relationships with their students is obviously necessary too. Similarly, disciplining teachers who arrive at work intoxicated would help teachers take their role more seriously.

As for the issue of the foreign teachers being ridiculed as ‘foreign idiots’; this a is circular problem in part borne of symbolic interactionism. It also goes beyond oral English teaching, and beyond PSU, to China’s relationship with foreign ‘Others’ and the way foreigners are portrayed in the media and other discourses. This is therefore not something that can be remedied at the level of a single university, particularly where foreign teachers’ ostensible (and in some cases proven) inability as teachers might also serve as a salve to the insecurities of some Chinese teachers of English. De-coupling foreign teachers’ one-to-one association with the seemingly intangible, skills-based oral English program would help, for example by having foreign teachers, such as Beth, teach ‘content’ subjects, such as culture, in English; this was already beginning at PSU, as of 2008–2009. This relies on the foreign teachers being better qualified than is currently true of some, which is where Phil’s push for teacher qualifications is important as it disrupts the supply side evidence of foreign teachers’ idiocy.

In addition, a better thought out approach to teaching ‘culture’ is necessary, both to improve students’ (and teachers’) intercultural competence for its own sake and for the sake of the stated aims of the curriculum, but also to intervene in the misunderstandings I have described between teachers’ outwards signifying behaviours and their intended meanings. Similar misunderstandings intervene in other performed behaviours between the foreign teachers and their students, as this excerpt from Karen illustrates:


My students think that if you wear a low-cut top and you show your cleavage, that’s very inappropriate … [they think] that we should always be wearing something up to the neck at all times, especially if we’re larger and we have big boobs. And I was trying to explain to them that in the West it’s sexy but it’s also quite normal, but that if you wear short shorts like Chinese girls wear then that would be perceived as slutty or, you know, like really short skirts, or hot pants even, you can see their bum cheeks. In the West that would just be, like, ‘oh my god, you’re wearing those with high shoes or high boots, my god, you must be’, yeah, ‘a prostitute’.


What is clear in this example is that both sides are approaching the question of appropriate clothing for young women from within their own paradigms. With teacher guidance and suitable materials, these culturally determined meanings could be explored in oral English classes. This would enable the presence of foreign teachers in tertiary oral English to be an exercise not in entrenching stereotypes but of crossing cultures.

Intercultural exploration, with a focus on students’ own cultures, is therefore my suggestion for the content of foreign teachers’ classes. This needs careful handling, and would be best taught bilingually by local and foreign teachers working together; the existing co-teacher structure might be used to establish such a program. This is not a lesson type that most of the foreign teachers can plan without substantial support, however. As shown in Ollie’s ‘culture’ lesson, described in Chapter 8, left to their own devices the foreign teachers may resort to simplistic, essentialist, and reductionist cultural stereotyping or, more benignly but just as insubstantially, exploration of surface-level cultural artefacts and trivia. Teaching intercultural competence in place of oral English would serve to validate the knowledge that the students bring to class but also the knowledge that the Chinese teachers bring to the co-teacher project. By conducting much of the discussion in English, students would have a chance to develop their communicative competence, as in Ryan’s later lessons. The different discussions with different groups of students would also mitigate the repetitions problem, in which the teachers struggled with repeating the same lesson 15 times throughout the week. Teaching culture might also serve to reduce the problem of foreign teachers negatively evaluating their Chinese colleagues because of their perception of the latter’s sometimes limited proficiency in English, as Chinese teachers bring local cultural knowledge as a tangible strength.

‘Culture teaching’ would require substantial teacher development, and would likely be of intrinsic interest to teachers. This development program could therefore serve as a draw card that would allow PSU recruitment to move away from its reliance on ‘backpacker’ teachers. Such teacher development could be achieved in two ways. Firstly, teacher induction and subsequent teacher support could be expanded and could draw upon the resources of academics or others specializing in intercultural training rather than hoping that a DELTA-qualified


teacher can provide adequate teacher preparation for this highly complex teaching situation. For example, the texts and activities in Holliday, Hyde, and Kullman’s (2004) book Intercultural communication: An advanced resource book would be an excellent starting place for teachers’ guided intercultural explorations. In addition, Sowden (2007) provides a discussion of teacher development related to teaching ‘culture’. Secondly, more appropriate materials could be developed for use at PSU, rather than relying on teachers’ ability to adapt a general English textbook for speaking and intercultural skills development. Again, these materials could draw upon the expertise of academics and others involved with educating teachers in the teaching of intercultural competence.

All of the suggestions made here are ‘horses’ that may usefully be the target of PSU’s current peregrinations on the back of a donkey. But horses are more expensive; they require more upkeep. It may therefore be that, at the present time and until China’s education reform progresses to a point where the role of English is either strengthened (by the widespread perception of communicative need) or else pared back (given the role of Chinese as a regional lingua franca), that a donkey is sufficient. As things stand, however, the employment of foreign teachers of oral English at PSU is riding a donkey in search of a horse.

Multiculturalism with Chinese characteristics

This section examines wider implications of my study in two areas. First, China’s relationship with outsiders and, second, middle-ground transnationalism and individuals’ development of intercultural competence through their experiences. It considers participants’ wider contexts in Shanghai and some tantalizingly partial data from this study into which future researchers may wish to delve.

As discussed before, one rationale for employing foreign teachers at PSU seems to be to provide credibility both to the university and its English teaching program but also to China’s status as an emerging superpower. Leo explains:

There’s a reason why Shanghai wants all of the Fortune 500 companies headquarters in Asia to be in Shanghai rather than to be in Singapore. … What you have done and what you have [got] identifies who you are, right? As a nation it’s the same. … Foreigners working in China are [seen to be] working for us [Chinese]. Why? Because we’re great. That attitude is not just a fact, it’s, like, encouraged.


Dan’s view is similar:

Shanghai being multicultural, it’s more about China getting money and status. I don’t think they [Chinese leaders?] really want Shanghai to become multicultural but they desperately want it to be seen worldwide as a very multicultural, international place.



Beth expands on this theme, highlighting an inherent irony:

During the [Shanghai 2010] Expo, the city planners have been doing all they can to make Shanghai look shiny and new, like the air quality controls [i.e. emissions controls implemented during the Expo] ... and the thing about ‘the metro is the longest in the world’...it’s all about face. … It’s this terrible inferiority complex where they’re desperate to prove they’re as good as New York or Paris but the only way they can prove that is by emulating it.


These participants agree that a key role of foreigners is to enhance local status, whether of Shanghai in particular or China more generally. This relies on the construction of foreign Others as substantially different from the Chinese and of Shanghai as ‘as good as’ (or ‘better than’) other cities. The role of foreigners seems to be to bestow an approving gaze and also to play a role in evidencing the city’s claim to global significance. Beth points out the paradox, however, that by seeking to show that Shanghai is ‘as good as’ elsewhere, it implicitly holds up ‘elsewhere’ as an exonormative aspirational model. This tends to undermine its ‘global’ credentials.

This affected participants’ experiences of Shanghai, and most commented that they had been unable to integrate as easily as they would like to because of the notion of ‘foreigners’ as very different from the Chinese. As mentioned in Chapter 4, this was also my own experience of living in Shanghai. They explain:

[Shanghai] desperately wants to be multicultural but it’s not. It’s still incredibly provincial in so many ways. … Shanghai is considered the most Westernized [mainland] Chinese city, and still, walking through the streets … people just stop and stare, and their jaws drop, and they go, ‘waiguoren!’ [foreigner]. In Shanghai, all of their multiculture is for show, none of it is actually serious, it is all face. … Everything in Shanghai is just for public consumption, it’s just for show. It’s like, ‘we don’t care about the foreigners; we just care that you’re sitting here … making China feel all worldly’.


Shanghai is waiguoren city, right. But there’s still a lot of staring and pointing at waiguoren, lots of ‘hello’ in the street. … It shows just how untouched China really is. It’s like they’re still mystified by foreigners in China’s supposedly, like, most pushed-out-to-the-West city.


Shanghai isn’t really multicultural. … Maybe it’s bicultural. Anything that’s foreign is lumped into this other pile called ‘foreign culture’. When I was living in England it was like, ‘oh, that person’s Greek, and she’s Italian, and he’s Brazilian’. And now I just, I don’t see it, these differences anymore,


we’re all waiguoren. … I have more in common with a Russian here than I do with a Russian in London because we’re both here; we’re both foreigners.


These quotes speak of participants’ lived experiences of the Self/Other binary prevalent in Chinese discourse. As Conceison (2004) says (cited in Chapter 3), this is an ‘Othering’ that ‘triggers fragmentation, alienation, and objectification of the Self through the powerfully dominating gaze of the Other’ (p. 3). However, Ollie’s last point, about perceived shared experiences among transnationals in Shanghai is of vital importance, and is discussed later in this section.

The self/other binary affects individual transnationals’ experiences if they are treated (professionally or socially) as interchangeable waiguoren. Where attributed identities are generic, or essentialist, people may appropriate exaggerated home-country identities (Holliday et al. 2004: 12) or may strongly assert their own individual identities. This would explain some teachers’ retreat into an expatriate world in Shanghai, which Leo describes:

Shanghai is not a multicultural city. You might see a lot of expats around, but a true multicultural city is where everybody … interacts with each other. The expats don’t interact with local people. They interact with the bar girls in the [Western] bars, with the store clerk at City Shop [a Western supermarket]. … What that creates is, when you talk to the [foreign] teachers, there’s some negativity, … some confusion about China. And there’s the same feeling among the local people. … There’s a misunderstanding.


The negativity, confusion, and misunderstanding Leo mentions also occur throughout much of the intercultural contact at PSU; as discussed, this seems to reinforce and reify perceived cultural distances.

There may also be more subtle factors that reinforce perceived Self/Other distance, such as the following perception that Beth describes:

Shanghai desperately wants to be cosmopolitan and stand on the world stage and yet there is, what we would consider, this cringing, blinkered racism … Blacks are still regarded as freaks. … Part of it is the wish for the dominant Han Chinese to not be perceived as farmers, so city people refer to farmers, to Chinese peasants, as ‘Blacks’. … They talk about Black people in China in this terribly racist way. It’s very jarring.


The problem Beth is describing is one source of cultural distance. However, there is also an implied difference in her discourse and that of some of the other participants:


It’s like they’re still mystified by foreigners (Ryan)Blacks are still regarded as freaks (Beth)China’s developing and still very traditional (Sam, from Chapter 9)

In all of these, the word ‘still’ implies a position from which China will develop towards a norm that the participants’ own cultures have ‘already’ reached. Implicit is a linear model of development in which China remains backward. This assumption may be a further source of cultural distance between the participants and their hosts.

Phil is the participant who is perhaps best integrated into local life, and while he resists much of the comparative, sometimes reductionist, sensemaking in which the participants sometimes engage, he also perceives a cultural difference in the nature of Chinese multiculturalism:

Multiculturalism here’s very much on Chinese terms. … There’s an externally driving force to the multiculturalism here, a controlling force … it’s like an invisible hand. … The guiding forces are a lot more pertinent to our day-to-day existence than they might be in London, where different cultures may be allowed to breathe and to integrate more. … Here it’s, as long as that multiculturalism supports the internationalism of Shanghai as framed by … the Chinese. Whereas the multiculturalism in the UK is more organic, it is what it is.


It’s not as if London council says, ‘this is the area we’ve planned for you guys to go and integrate with each other’. … Things like the creating of Xintiandi [an upmarket, notionally ‘Western’, entertainment complex], those kind of areas … it’s like a multicultural theme park of Shanghai, planned. … It’s supposed to represent the internationalism of Shanghai.


Xintiandi, that Phil mentions, comprises bars, shops, and restaurants including Western chains such as Starbucks. As well as local and Western patrons, Xintiandi attracts Chinese tour groups from outside Shanghai who are seemingly interested in the spectacle of a Western space, of Westerners themselves, and of Shanghai’s apparent worldliness. As the participants cited in this section suggest, this ostensible worldliness may be rather more evidentiary than ‘organic’ in nature, and seems to play an important role in Shanghai’s social imaginary of itself.

So these participants’ perceptions and sensemaking are not just about English language teaching, or PSU, or even China. What this section serves to illustrate is the way transnationals make sense of transnationalism itself, and their negotiation of what it means to be a foreign resident of a city that they perceive is insufficiently (or insincerely) multicultural. This is where Ollie’s point is important. He perceives he shares common ground with Russians, for example, because both are ‘foreigners’ in China. So while the participants’ intercultural competence may not develop through contact with their Chinese students, as both sides extract from the contact


situation at least a partial reduction and belittling of the Other, perhaps the site of intercultural competence development for transnational teachers is in their contact with each other and with other non-Chinese people in China. Ryan mentioned Jordanian and Ukrainian connections in Shanghai, for instance; participants’ social circles include fellow ‘foreigners’ from myriad countries. In addition, of course, some of the participants have formed close relationships with Chinese people, especially more ‘transnational’ Chinese who may have lived outside China, as Todd’s girlfriend had for example, or those, like Xiaoli, who have become ‘local cosmopolitans’ (Notar 2008) through seeking out contact with ‘foreign friends’. Although ‘local cosmopolitans’ may be atypical of local people more generally, they do provide a contact zone with the host society. Thus although PSU classrooms are a site of Othering, on both sides, participants may still find they become more ‘worldly’ from living in Shanghai’s multicultural foreign community.

This section has indicated two future directions for research. This could focus, firstly, on Chinese and expatriate residents’ perceptions of multiculturalism and the role of resident ‘foreigners’ in China; this research might be jointly undertaken by Chinese and ‘Western’ scholars. Secondly, there is a need for greater understanding of the nature and extent to which intercultural competence is developed in transnational environments such as that found among the teacher group and other resident ‘foreigners’ in Shanghai. Future research could focus on myriad other contexts in which an expatriate population lives somewhat separately from the host population. One example might be the SCUBA diving community in a diving enclave such as Dahab, Egypt for example. Another example of a context in which this type of research might be conducted is among pilgrims walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain. In both these contexts, transnationals from many cultures are united by their common interest but may interact somewhat separately from the local population. These situations therefore offer the potential for understanding the development of intercultural competence through transnational experiences and spaces.

Revisiting the participants: Beth

Up until this point in the book, all the quotes, findings, and discussion come from the main period of data collection, from 2007 to 2009. But in 2011, I went back to China, and also to Cambodia, to re-interview some of the participants. This section discusses the effects of the PSU experience on Phil, Leo, Dan, Ollie, Ryan, and Beth.

Going back to see the PSU teachers was like visiting old, dear friends; for all that some of them may come across as frustrated and complaining, even sometimes arrogant, some have become my friends. It would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise. This is the unsung reality of longitudinal ethnographic research: it is hard not to become involved. Back in Shanghai I drank green tea with Leo in his new apartment, the walls covered with photos of his recent wedding; outside the window rare snow fell. With Beth, I ate red-bean flavoured pastries from a new French-inspired café near her apartment; throughout our recording her dog can be heard whining, desperate for a taste. With Ollie, I drank coffee in the Marriot Hotel: the


dumpling restaurant he had suggested was far too noisy for recording our interview, so after we had eaten I bought him a coffee that cost more than the tea, the red-bean pastries, and the dumplings combined. Shanghai is still a city of huge contrasts. Then I flew to Qingdao where I stayed with Phil and his family for a few days before taking the train to Beijing, where I met up with Ryan. Ever the travellers, an identity over which Ryan and I had bonded initially, we went together to the ice festival in Harbin. There, we walked around the ice and snow sculptures and across the frozen Songhua River in minus 30 degrees Celsius. Then I flew to Cambodia for a few days with Dan. It was sixty degrees warmer in Phnom Penh than in Harbin, and this variation is a metaphor for just how different the participants’ lives are now.

The Beth I visited in Shanghai is quite different to the Beth I met in 2007. No longer working on her PhD, and now embracing the fact of living a few more years in China and working hard on her Chinese language skills, Beth now freelances part time as a teacher of culture and communication skills, earning more than at PSU and drawing much more on her background in anthropology; she teaches intercultural skills to Japanese as well as Chinese corporations and individuals. But her main focus is improving her Chinese.

Of her time at PSU, she says:

I don’t really regret my time there. PSU gave me the platform to figure out how I could … use my [anthropology] training in a useful way, in China, and that got me started to slowly thinking about what other things I could do with my training. … I knew I didn’t want to be an English teacher, I knew that was not for me. … So I had to rack my brain, figure out what skills I had and how I could use them.


For Beth, the time at PSU was one of transition, a pathway that led her from the study of anthropology to working as a corporate trainer of intercultural communication skills. But, as she perceives it, anthropological expertise alone is insufficient to be effective in China and she is now prioritizing learning Chinese as this opens up more training consultancy options both within China and as a China Hand if she returns to the USA. For the foreseeable future, however, Beth does not anticipate returning ‘home’. She also questions the very notion of home, saying that ‘home is where my dog is’.

Beth has embraced China including, it seems, much of the ‘fuzziness’ and uncertainty that so frustrated many of the participants. She explains:

[Being in China] has made me more willing to be unfocused. I realize … I have lots of things I could do, I don’t just have to be the PhD. I can live my life and figure it out as it goes. And I’m actually OK with that. I wasn’t for a while. … Life in China is very unpredictable. Some people can handle that, others can’t. … I’m just enjoying my life for the journey … it’s nice not having a goal that ties me down.



Beth used a Chinese metaphor to explain her perception of the way she has changed in her four years in China: having been an oak tree, strong but inflexible, she has become a willow. China has taught her to bend with the winds and adapt as situations change.

This is not to say that Beth has ‘gone native’. While she acknowledges that she is open to change and that an extended sojourn in China has involved an identity shift, she also says:

I’m also not someone who is so in love with China that I want to live here forever. I could never go native in China. There are many things I like about China but there are also so many things I find infuriating. … [There’s the] ingrained cultural passiveness … but it’s passive aggression. People shoving in the metro. … There’s a surface[-level] flexibility, but also a strong undercurrent of latent aggression.


To me, this sounds like a more considered evaluation of the challenges of living in a crowded city than the ‘culture shock’ (over-)reactions of Todd and Sam cited in the previous chapter. Other long-term residents of Shanghai that I know, both Chinese and expatriate, make similar comments about people’s public-sphere behaviours and, as Beth does, may problematize the stereotype that Chinese people are ‘passive’.

Beth is also pragmatic about her decision to stay in Shanghai: ‘there are simply no jobs for folklorists in the US’ (Beth ‘interview’ 18/01/2011). This is a savvy reading of the impact of the global financial crisis on American academia and on the US labour market more widely: Shanghai is a better bet in these difficult times.

Nor has Beth lost any of her playfulness or her curiosity about the people and the cultures around her. This is exemplified by a tattoo that Beth got recently and her description of how she uses it to meet and understand people in Shanghai by ‘breaching’ the culture (Garfinkel, 1984). The tattoo, in large Chinese characters (each about 5cm square), is in black ink on Beth’s upper arm. It reads ba wang long, which means Tyrannosaurus Rex; this, says Beth, represents a milestone in her learning of Chinese as it was the first lexical item she worked out independently from context and from piecing together known Chinese characters. But in Shanghai slang, calling a woman a ‘dinosaur’ is calling her ugly. Beth uses her tattoo to engage people in conversations by telling them, with a straight face, that her tattoo means ‘beautiful’. Beth explains how this works:

It does allow me to screw around [laugh with] with Chinese people … My Chinese is getting good enough where I can have more interactions with people. … It’s a way to push boundaries. … Because if I tell people it means ‘beautiful’ I’ve created this really awkward social situation … where I can see what people will do.



Beth goes on to explain that her tattoo also acts as a social filter: while some people try to ‘save face’ by playing along that it really does mean ‘beautiful’, others try to explain her ‘mistake’. The latter are the people she befriends, as she feels she can engage better with a more direct style of communicating.

As this section demonstrates, Beth has made her experience at PSU work for her by using it as a launch pad for a career-changing sojourn in China, in which she has plenty of time to devote to learning Chinese, where she is gathering useful contacts and work experience as an intercultural trainer, and where she now earns more than double her PSU salary in far fewer hours’ work. Framed in terms of capital, Beth has transformed the cultural and symbolic capitals of being White, American, and educated (and therefore employable as an oral English teacher at PSU) into the far more tangible transferable skills of near-fluent Chinese, experience of putting her academic discipline knowledge into use as professional consultancy and corporate training, and the lived experience of crossing cultures herself. Beth has, it seems, gained and grown because of, and since, her PSU experience.

Teacher development: Ollie

The same cannot be said with such conviction of Ollie. Having initially been promoted to a senior teacher role at PSU and then to the role of Director of Studies at one of the other University Cooperation project sites in Shanghai, and also having taught English to children at an ‘experimental school’, as of the 2010-2011 academic year Ollie was back as an oral English teacher at PSU. He explains this as a desire to go back to teaching adults, but having started as a PSU oral English teacher in 2006, and having consistently professed a desire for career progression, Ollie does not seem to be succeeding against his own measure of success: promotion.

Skirting the issue of job titles, Ollie talked at length during our January 2011 interview about his professional learning since we last met and the way his teaching has developed as a result of different class types he has taught. This sounded initially as if Ollie had reframed his benchmark of success, shifting the locus inward to professional and personal development rather than relying on job titles as a barometer of career progression. I therefore asked him to describe how his teaching had developed since our last meeting in 2009.

Ollie enthusiastically described the reading he had been doing on suggestopedia, a 1970s language teaching methodology that advocates a three-stage lesson comprising the ‘deciphering’ phase (the teacher presenting new grammar and lexis), a ‘concert session’ (in which the teacher reads the text with, and subsequently without, students involvement, accompanied by baroque music), and the ‘elaboration’ phase, in which students sing songs, perform plays, and play games with the new language items (J C Richards and Rodgers 2001: 100–107). Ollie also said he had done some reading on neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and ‘unconscious hypnotic patterns’ in language and their use in teaching. While NLP is not a language teaching method as such (J. C. Richards and


Rodgers 2001: 130), attempts have been made to incorporate its humanistic, affect-focused tenets into language teaching (e.g. Revell and Norman 1997).

I asked Ollie to explain ‘unconscious hypnotic language patterns’ and what this means for his teaching:

In terms of teaching … we have, well, basic grammar. So we have modal verbs, yeah? Everyone knows, ‘we always do this, we sometimes do this, we seldom do that’, yeah? But modal verbs, if you look in a wider context, there are certain linguistic patterns, especially unconscious, hypnotic patterns, where you could use these expressions. … There are conversational hypnosis techniques where ‘well, maybe if we did this, we’d do this’, this is all part of the language.


How does this and his other reading affect Ollie’s classroom practice? He explained that he plays music as students enter the room, citing music as part of suggestopedia, and he says that he helps students as follows:

I noticed [that]… when [Chinese people] spoke [English], mainly they used primary present simple and past simple with a little bit of present continuous. And I highlighted that to the students. I show them a diagram of language and say ‘native speakers [of English], they use twelve different tenses’, and I have a very nice little diagram showing this. And it’s almost like this kind of medical chart, you know, you go up and you go down [gestures a list/table]. And I said, the Chinese people, it’s flat, it’s all just one level … in terms of tenses used. So you might say ‘I like to swim’ … or ‘I swam yesterday, when I was swimming yesterday I saw this, I haven’t been swimming for a long time’. And in just those examples there’s four or five different verbal tenses. And I say, ‘when we speak in English we use that’. … If you want to improve [your English], … then you have to focus and try and use these different tenses. … I’m just drawing their attention, getting them to notice these language bits.


I have struggled, many times when interviewing Ollie, to contain my feeling that he should not be teaching English language at all and that the dubious quality of his teaching gives my profession a ‘bad name’. This interview was no exception. Ollie’s ‘modal verbs’ (which are, of course, adverbs of frequency) and his description of teaching oral English by talking students through a diagram of twelve compound tenses makes me wonder whether he has developed at all as a teacher during the time I have known him. Earlier in this book I expressed doubts about Ollie’s suitability as a language teacher; this feeling was not in any way challenged by our conversation in January 2011.

Ethically, though, this is a tricky area. Ollie has consented to being involved in this study for the best part of four years and he has expressed enthusiasm


every time I have contacted him and asked if he would like to take part in another round of interviews and classroom observations. So to interview him and then to shoot down everything he says would be unfair and unethical. As much as Ollie is often far off the mark in his notions about teaching and language, there are no doubt plenty of native English speaking language ‘teachers’, in China and elsewhere, who are not even familiar with the terms modal verb or present perfect, let alone how, when, or whether to teach them. Given that Ollie continues to be involved with this project, and that during and after each interview, he thanks me for helping him develop as a teacher, I am conscious of doing what I can to steer him towards reading and other sources of professional development that will help him achieve his stated aim of improving his teaching. (In this case, for instance, I suggested that NLP, hypnosis, and suggestopedia may not be the best areas of focus at this stage of his teaching and that he would do well to read more mainstream methodological and language-focused resources, some examples of which I recommended.) But my concern is that Ollie is simply not developing as a teacher in Shanghai, where he is left to his own devices in terms of teacher support and development and where his students tolerate partial and inaccurate language explanations in place of effective teaching.

This was highlighted when I asked him about his so-called ‘modal verbs’. Of grammatical knowledge, and modal verbs in particular, Ollie said:

I couldn’t give you an exact example. I don’t have it on the top of my head. I’m just starting this, the levels and depths of grammar analysis. … It comes down to noticing; my level of awareness of how grammar structures are put together, has increased tenfold, twentyfold, but I still have a lot to learn. I couldn’t say, ‘this means this’.


Ollie has been working as an English language teacher, first in Thailand, then in China, since 2005; as of 2011, he was in his seventh year in the job. In any teaching role, but particularly ELT with its high attrition rates, seven years would be considered a reasonable amount of experience. But Ollie says he still struggles with language analysis and teaching, surely a cornerstone of any understanding of an English language teacher’s skills set. This suggests that the experience he is accruing at PSU (and other public sector contexts in Shanghai) may be worth rather less than the experience he might acquire elsewhere, in a context in which teachers can draw upon useful professional development and well qualified academic managers, and one in which the students demand effective teaching. Instead, Ollie seems to be atrophying as a teacher in Shanghai, chasing his tail in obscure readings only loosely associated with language teaching, and still struggling to make sense of how language, and oral English in particular, might be taught in the context. His teaching seems to be improving only minimally at best, and arguably actually worsening.


‘Sink or swim’ challenges: Ollie

But Ollie’s PSU and other Shanghai teaching experiences seem to have affected him not just as a teacher but also as a person. These effects may appear to be positive on the surface: as discussed, Ollie enjoys a higher standard of living, level of multicultural engagement, and social status in Shanghai than he might in England. One potential negative is that this may ‘trap’ him in China, as this capital that cannot easily be ‘converted’ elsewhere; this was Karen’s concern. But in Ollie’s 2011 interviews another issue became apparent with the way foreign teachers’ social and professional status is constructed in Shanghai: they may be pressured to feign expertise.

The following excerpt from Ollie’s interview illustrates the problem. In it, we are discussing a poetry course that Ollie had taught.

PHIONA: Do you feel equipped to teach poetry?OLLIE: Yes … I did an MA course in writing, a masters course in writing, and

when I did that I was researching all the time, literary devices, all that.PHIONA: Oh, I didn’t know you’d done a Master’s in writing.OLLIE: Oh, no I haven’t [laughs]. No, I taught one. … So I had to learn

very quickly, lots of different aspects of writing.PHIONA: But is that – just to put this out there – you don’t have a Master’s

degree in writing. Are we, as teachers, equipped to teach things that we haven’t, ourselves, studied?

OLLIE: Um, yes and no. I feel that the course that I did for the poetry was a very high quality course. … We had very good responses from the whole course [student cohort].

PHIONA: Do you see what I’m getting at though? I mean, I wouldn’t be equipped to teach poetry. I’ve never studied poetry beyond high school; have you?

OLLIE: Yeah, recently quite a lot. PHIONA: You get online and read it? I could do that too. But—OLLIE: This is China [laughs].PHIONA: Yeah, but that’s what I’m asking you, though. You’re asking [the

students] to do something where you’re really on the edge of your knowledge.

OLLIE: But that’s exciting because you’re learning.PHIONA: Does that make you into a charlatan? [pause] Somebody trying to

teach something that they don’t know all that much about?OLLIE: Initially yes, but you can get past that, and then you’ll learn, it’s a

learning curve. You either learn or you don’t learn. … You could do [i.e. study] a course, you could do an MA course in writing … I haven’t done an MA in writing … but I know enough about it now to teach it to undergraduates and at Master’s level.

PHIONA: But if I do a course in writing I expect the people teaching me to have PhDs in writing and to have studied literature for years. To have a level of knowledge greater than my own.


OLLIE: You’re not going to get that in China. … You can see it as a challenge. It’s either sink or swim. I’ve always felt that. You take on the challenge, you learn from it or you don’t do it. … [In Europe] the content of the course would be different. If this was at [a university in the UK, for example], the complexity of language, the complexity of the ideas would be at a much higher level than over here. … As long as you satisfy the Chinese audience, you give them information that they don’t already know, and they perceive themselves to be learning something that they haven’t already learned, then everything’s fine.

PHIONA: So if I just get on Wikipedia and learn about something and structure a lesson around it and go in and teach it, that’s OK?

OLLIE: Yeah. … Yes, we’re not experts but OK. … Every semester there’s another ‘oh, you’re going to be teaching culture, you’re going to be teaching poetry’, or whatever. … It would take time to put a course curriculum together but it would be fun, it would be stimulating. … I don’t have an ‘A’ level in English, but it would be OK.


There are two issues here. The first is the one I allude to in the interview, that Western teachers may be put in a position of having to pretend to know more than they do, and to operate on the very edge of their knowledge, at constant risk of being uncovered as charlatans. The second issue is Ollie’s dismissive, reductive statements about China, Chinese education, and Chinese students:

• This is China.• You’re not going to get that in China.• It’s part of the system in China.• [In Europe], the complexity of the ideas would be at a much higher level

than over here [in China].• As long as you satisfy the Chinese audience.

These indicate a neo-colonial view of the situation in which Western teachers of poetry and culture and other subjects related to English (who may not even have high school qualifications in the subject, as Ollie reveals at the end of the excerpt) are ‘good enough’ to teach at Master’s level in China because it is ‘only’ China.

Both these issues are potential negative outcomes of the PSU teaching experience for Ollie and others like him as people. For Ollie, the bigger negative effect appears to be the version of Chinese education he has constructed, which is so bad that it requires foreign teachers informed by last-minute Wikipedia reading to teach content subjects on Master’s degree courses; the unstated message is that no better-qualified Chinese teacher is apparently available to do the job. While patently untrue, this seems to be Ollie’s impression. And although he does not seem to recognize the issue, as a long-term resident of Shanghai, looking down on its system and its people cannot be good for his integration into the life of the city.


The second issue, that appears to affect Ollie rather less, is that he has been pushed into a corner whereby the ‘emotional labour’ expected of him includes feigning knowledge and skills he does not have. The stakes here are high: failing in this deceit sets him up to fail as a teacher. Although Ollie says he is glad of the ‘sink or swim’ experience, and does seem to be rising to the challenge, others in this position might respond differently to the stress and hard work of being asked to play-act a role for which they were unqualified and underprepared. Ollie, however, seems not to question this expectation.

Moving on: Dan and Leo

My reconnections with Leo and Dan were very positive experiences as, like Beth, both have moved into new roles in new teaching contexts and both seem happy with the choices they have made. These seem to suit them better than PSU, where, by 2009, they felt ‘bummed’ (Dan) and ‘burned out’ (Leo). However, both describe PSU as a learning experience to some extent.

Leo now works as the Director of Studies at a language school in suburban Shanghai that specializes in small-group language lessons for children ranging in age from pre-school to young teenagers. I arrived at the school to meet Leo at the arranged time but he had forgotten about our meeting. As the school receptionist suggested that he might be back later in the afternoon, and as my time in Shanghai was limited, I agreed to wait for him. The receptionist showed me into the staffroom, and while I waited, I struck up conversations with some of the teachers that Leo now supervises.

These teachers’ responses to Leo could not have been more different to the PSU teachers, most of whom, by mid 2009, where openly criticizing Leo and avoiding contact with him. In contrast, Leo seems to enjoy the respect of his new teachers: all had his number in their phones, all were able to speculate meaningfully on when he might be back and where he might have gone, and all were friendly when I said I had known Leo for a few years (and so could have been constructed as a friend, which I suppose I also am). In contrast to PSU, Leo seems to enjoy respect and camaraderie in his new workplace.

When we finally met up, Leo said that he is much happier in his current role than he was at PSU and that he has a much better relationship with the teachers there. In part, he attributes this to the teaching itself: while oral English teaching at PSU was ‘babysitting’, the parents of the language school students expect their children’s English to improve as a result of attending. This provides the teachers with a sense of purpose and a clearer job description than was ever available at PSU. And, in turn, this makes Leo’s own role clearer: he can observe and provide feedback on lessons against a more meaningful set of criteria, of what the students, and their parents, are looking for. As a result, while ‘fun’ is still a factor (as would be expected, with younger learners), lessons also have clear language development aims so as to satisfy the parents’ demands. This, Leo says, has helped him develop both his own teaching and his ability to provide academic support to new teachers.


In addition, Leo is now part of a team of Directors of Studies across several language schools, and whereas at PSU he was rather isolated (between Phil as a somewhat idealistic manager and a group of teachers that no longer engaged with him) he can now call upon peer support in his role. Of the isolation and frustration of the PSU oral English Director of Studies role, Leo says: ‘I don’t know if anyone could ever be good at that job … it’s impossible’ (Leo ‘interview’ 17/01/2011). In support of this assertion, Leo told me that the Director of Studies employed after him, in the 2009–2010 academic year, had resigned from PSU before the year was out. While I have no way of checking this individual’s reasons for resigning, having watched Leo struggle in the role I agree that it would be difficult to succeed as the Director of Studies at PSU.

However, Leo (who describes himself as an optimistic, ‘glass half full kind of guy’) does recognize that he did learn some things from working at PSU, primarily in the areas of people management and crisis management:

At the time I didn’t really enjoy [working at PSU] but … I knew that one day I would benefit from this experience. … Now I say to myself, ‘if I could deal with Ryan I can deal with anybody’ [laughs]. … PSU has made me, my ability to deal with problems, my ability to deal with issues that arise, like emergency issues; that ability has definitely strengthened. I think also it gives me a different perspective on what I think English teaching is. … There isn’t really a definition of what language teaching is. It’s all kinds of things. It can be.


The last part of this extract is intriguing, and speaks to the discussion that was the topic of Chapter 8. Although oral English teaching at PSU is called English language teaching, its purpose may be quite different: contact with Western ‘Others’, perhaps, and/or a negotiation of Chinese identities. This more nuanced perspective of the role/s of Western ‘teachers’ has broadened Leo’s understanding of the multifarious, ever-changing nature of the English language teaching industry. This puts him in an advantageous position when understanding and managing the potentially complex expectations and motivations of the parents who send their children to the language school. If their hope is that their children will learn some English but also have some contact with ostensibly representative Western foreigners, Leo is well placed both to help the teachers understand the expectations placed upon them but also to broaden clients’ understandings of what ‘Westernness’ is actually like.

Perhaps as a result of this, Leo no longer seems to feel the need to perform his exaggerated version of Westernness and Western masculinity; gone are the staffroom ‘boys club’ culture and Leo’s caricatured persona of a ‘Western teacher’. Of course, this may have dissipated gradually as he got older, got married, and became ever more settled in Shanghai; he has now lived there for ten years. But Leo says he increasingly sees his identity not as Canadian-Chinese, or even as Chinese-Canadian, but as Chinese. Our January 2011 interview recording is


quite different from other conversations I have had with Leo since 2007: he refers to the Tang and Yuan dynasties, to Chinese calligraphy, and to his interest in Shanghai news and local events. It seems that, having negotiated and performed a somewhat confused, ‘hyphenated’ identity at PSU, Leo is now much more content to be who he is.The same can also be said for Dan, although his post-PSU experiences have been more trying. Having left PSU in mid 2009, Dan spent an academic year teaching at a language school in Vietnam. This, he says, he hated even more than PSU as he struggled to meet like-minded teachers passionate about teaching and interested in discussing their lessons outside of class. He says he also struggled to enjoy the location and its culture. This is different from Shanghai, where Dan liked his neighbourhood very much. So initially, having left Shanghai, Dan’s situation seems to have gone from bad to worse.

Not speaking Vietnamese beyond survival level (or indeed Thai, Chinese, or Khmer) is one reason Dan gives for his struggle to integrate and settle in any of the four countries in which he has lived as an English teacher. In addition, having moved city and workplace ‘every ten months for the past five years’, Dan says he is ‘exhausted’. Add to this the health concerns Dan experienced in Shanghai, and a bout of dengue fever he suffered in Cambodia, and Dan’s story is one of having endured some very difficult, stressful, lonely times.

However, Dan’s clouds do seem to have a silver lining: Phnom Penh suits him well. He says he likes the city very much and has returned twice to teach at the same institution, a language school that ‘value[s] proper teaching’ and encourages and provides for teacher development. In addition to English, he is teaching into pre-university preparation courses that include, among other things, the development of students’ critical thinking skills. While challenging, Dan says he enjoys support and that it is stretching him professionally.

Dan’s sense that Phnom Penh is ‘working out’ also stems from an income that allows him to live independently in a large, central apartment with a terrace and a friendly local family living downstairs. This setup, he says, involves him in local life. In addition, he has formed connections with a group of colleagues with whom he is beginning to socialize. As a result of all of this, Dan seems a lot happier now than he was in China (or, as he describes it, in Vietnam).

However, Dan continues to struggle with professional development, his identity as a teacher, and his reasons for being in Asia. Having described his initial motivation as living and working in Thailand, by the time he undertook his pre-service teaching qualification in 2006 Dan was already reading about and keenly interested in English language and language teaching. It matters to him to work in a like-minded professional milieu and he struggles to find this in East Asia, where much of entry-level English language teaching seems to be the preserve of experience-seeking ‘backpacker teachers’.

Dan’s motivations are therefore tri-partite: he is concerned about location, career development, and community. But his experience has been that this sets up a perpetual cycle of the grass appearing to be greener elsewhere, wherever he goes. When he taught in Cambodia in 2008, the career prospects looked better


at PSU and he returned to be the senior teacher. But the negative, critical teachers’ room discourse and many teachers’ lack of interest in discussing teaching meant that Dan became isolated and depressed. And so he looked to Vietnam, although this turned out to be worse in every respect, and now he has returned to Cambodia.

One way out of this cycle would be further ELT qualifications: a Master’s degree, for example. This would give Dan access to more senior roles in language schools in a variety of locations and would also open up teaching jobs in more professionally oriented workplaces. In either context, but particularly the latter, Dan could expect that more of his colleagues would be professionally qualified teachers (whether local or expatriate) rather than ‘backpackers’. This would, perhaps, allow Dan to find his own ‘holy grail’ of a welcoming and interesting location, a professionally stimulating job, and a like-minded community of practice.

However, having talked in 2009 about undertaking further ELT training, and although he says he is still considering this, Dan now frames further qualifications as a route into a Director of Studies role, which he rejects for himself as he says he is ‘not a leader’ (Dan ‘interview’ 28/01/2011). This is a somewhat surprising construction, because in plenty of contexts such a qualification equips a teacher to teach rather than be a manager; indeed, such programs comprise courses/units about language and teaching rather than management.

But it appears that Dan has absorbed, from his various teaching experiences, a similar perspective to that expressed by Karen in Chapter 11: ‘you should progress up [into academic management] … there’s no point in just staying teaching English classes’ (Karen ‘interview’ 14/06/2009). This appears to be an effect of the sum of Dan’s teaching experience in East Asia, that to be more qualified in ELT necessarily means working as an academic manager. Like Karen, Dan seems to have absorbed the message that classroom-level English language teaching jobs, as a Westerner in East Asia, are the preserve of ‘backpackers’ with four weeks training (or less), and that further qualifications mean a move ‘up’ and out of the classroom. As Dan enjoys teaching and has no wish to be an academic manager he rejects the idea of further ELT qualifications.

This is a sad indictment of the state of the English language teaching ‘scene’. As I mentioned in Chapter 10, many of the non-participant PSU teachers had undertaken ELT qualifications, including weekend-long courses, even more minimal than most of the study participants. In addition, some of the PSU staff qualifications were of limited validity, such as the course on which Dan and Ollie studied and on which Ollie had worked as a teacher trainer soon after completing the same course. The entry point is rather low. But, as Dan and Karen’s views on further qualifications indicate, the exit point from classroom teaching is also low: if you are to stay in the industry and gain further qualifications, it is assumed that you will not be a mere teacher.

This devalues the work of language teaching, and may, in part, explain Dan’s ongoing frustration with his professional identity and the various workplace communities he has encountered. It may also explain Dan’s tendency to ‘beat


himself up’, as he puts it: if he frames English teaching as a low-level job, to then struggle to be successful at it (compared to ‘teachers’ like Ryan) must surely be a bitter disappointment. This seems to be a major source of frustration for Dan. And, having committed himself to English teaching in Asia, Dan struggles with the professional identity issues that this presents.

Transferable capital: Phil and Ryan

Ryan is the participant I revisited who has moved on furthest, professionally and personally, since the study began. Having initially moved to Chengdu to study Chinese applied linguistics, Ryan is now undertaking a Master’s degree in International Relations, in Chinese, at Tsinghua University, China’s top-ranked university (Chinese Academy of Management Science 2009).

Ryan says he is much happier both studying in Chinese and doing something he perceives as purposeful. In his inimitable style, he explains:

Here’s the thing, right. I give a rat’s ass about this fucking Master’s degree that I’m doing. And that’s a pain in the ass, man. Do you know what I mean? That just takes away from your freedom. It means I have to be in Beijing, it means I have to stay here, it means I have to build this life, I have to fucking deal with the winter [laughs]. It’s a trapping thing, right? … Whereas PSU, you could quit and those students wouldn’t care. You could not be there and they wouldn’t care.


He clarifies this as different from his previous sense of his own purpose:

Studying again is more of a commitment than being a traveller … It’s like I’m there for a purpose. … Before, everything was centered around travelling and, you know, this is, like, a different path. It’s not work every day so [that] I can travel … now, it’s a bigger commitment to something. It’s like I’m stuck down.


However, he rejects the notion that at PSU he was ‘drifting’ and is now goal-driven:

When I was all about travel … [it] was just as important in my life. So this is not a revolution, it’s just, like, a new project. … It’s not true to say that this is purposeful and that [PSU, travelling, and learning Chinese] wasn’t. Both are purposeful in different ways.


But he also says that, now he is studying, his lifestyle has changed: he says he has stopped ‘chasing girls’ and smoking marijuana:


It’s time for me to be like, ‘OK, let’s put this aside and see what I can accomplish without it’. ... Right now my life is busy and I don’t know how well I’d pull it off if I was doing it [living the same lifestyle as he had in Shanghai] … I’ve never looked at my weed habit as a bad thing, it’s more like a hobby … it’s much better than going out on the piss. … I’ve always had a good time doing drugs. There are three things make me who I am, right, my experiences in education, my experiences travelling, and my experiences on drugs. I’ve always had a fun time with them, right, and I’m never really against them but there’s a time and a place and now it’s time to see what other paths I could take.


In contrast to his previous interviews, Ryan also showed a much clearer sense of having considered where his ‘China capital’ might lead him. Discussing future prospects, Ryan describes making connections through studying at Tsinghua and the possibility that his fluency in Chinese and his experience in China might lead into Canadian government or multinational corporation jobs that rely on cross-cultural know-how. Having been bored teaching at PSU, Ryan is now considering career paths that he hopes would be more challenging and fulfilling.

Among these, one path to which he returned throughout our conversations was academia:

It just makes sense for me to be an academic … I love the performance aspect of teaching. … I love getting up in front of people and talking. … I’m enjoying doing my research, doing presentations, writing papers. … I’ll maybe go back later and do my PhD.


Given his success in his Tsinghua studies to date, and his language and other learning throughout his years in Taiwan and Shanghai, Ryan seems to have followed Vance’s (2005) advice, quoted in Chapter 3, by making excellent use of English teaching as the means to other ends. He has shown that this can result in valuable cultural capital if handled well, and he does not seem to have let his PSU experience negatively affect his own objectives in China.

However, Ryan’s lived experience at PSU has led him to an understanding that it is perfectly possible to hold down a job despite turning up stoned and participating in the ‘Room of Doom’ discourse. These experiences have resulted in, or reinforced, a maverick identity. He explains:

[My identity] is defined in contrast to what a normal life is perceived to be. … I’ve never really been like other people; when I try to be like other people I often fail [laughs]. So I have this thing where I’ve got to cut my own road. … I’m not really ready to accept a paradigm that doesn’t completely fit me. … I’m not one of the ones that keeps the world going around; I’m one of the ones that goes around the world.



While this may well be a viable identity in academia, Ryan will likely struggle in corporate or government employment if this is how he sees himself.

Like Ryan, Phil’s post-PSU work is also something he perceives as a progression from his role as the Academic Manager of the University Cooperation program. In his current role, as the deputy head of an international school in Qingdao, Phil perceives he has more leeway to influence and implement policy.

He describes having felt frustrated at being powerless to develop the oral English program significantly at PSU because of the restrictive parameters set by the university (such as class sizes, course duration, and mixed level groups). He therefore focused on developing staff and systems, but says he realizes that this was of limited effectiveness:

Working with people is like herding cats. … People are going through whatever they’re going through and there’s only a certain amount, the parameters you put around people that can manage that; can contain that.


But unlike most of the other participants, and in keeping with his demeanour throughout his time in Shanghai, Phil is consistently positive about what he has learned from working at PSU and the way he has subsequently been able to leverage the skills he acquired into his subsequent work:

I can’t complain, I enjoyed it, and I’m here now because of it. … It tickles the brain, it stimulates the brain. … In other industries you wouldn’t get the chance to do this kind of stuff.


There are echoes here of Ollie’s ‘sink or swim’ learning-curve experience, and what these two participants have in common is an understanding that they have experienced working in roles for which they would elsewhere likely be considered unprepared professionally.

Of professional development, Phil says:

I started [working as the Director of Studies at PSU, and then as the Academic Manager of the University Cooperation Program] without a diploma [in ELT]. I picked it up along the way. So I wasn’t capable of thinking through. I hadn’t read enough to think it through. And then the questions that you asked [while researching this study], they made me think on another level altogether.


This is perhaps testament to the beneficial effect of having an educational researcher in a setting in which teachers and academic managers may not be able to count on professional development, if participating in research allows them to develop as educators. This seems to have been the case for Phil, who describes the experience of participating in the research as follows:


That questioning, that stayed with me. In loads of situations that I’m in, I’m going – in fact that’s something I think I’ve learned from you – these kind of touchstone questions in my head. I’m going, ‘what’s going on here? Why do they think that? Why are they reacting in that way?’ It’s useful.


Phil’s sense that he became a manager before he was entirely qualified even as a teacher reinforces the notion that the exit point from classroom teaching is rather low. In addition, while Phil succeeded as well as could be expected, given the challenging realities of managing the University Cooperation Program, his experience also highlights the problem that teachers and other educators may be expected to undertake roles well beyond their capabilities. While some, like Phil, rise to the challenge and accrue transferable skills as a result, others may struggle. Further, the practice of employing Western ‘teachers’ (who are not really teachers) and ‘academic managers’ (who are not really academic managers) may result in a tarring of other, more qualified and experienced, Western teachers and academic managers with the brush of amateurism and charlatanism.

The glitter ball: Reconsidering reflexivity

In the previous section I mentioned Phil’s reflections on the process of taking part in the present study. In this concluding section I extend this discussion and consider the participants’ participation, my role as a researcher among them, and also the effects that my study had on the PSU context and the teachers themselves. This section is called ‘the glitter ball’ because that was how Phil described his and PSU’s rationale for allowing me to research among the PSU teachers in the first place. A glitter ball reflects light into disparate and unpredictable areas of a space, and it was Phil’s hope that my presence at PSU would highlight unexplored areas of established practices, thereby allowing him and others to improve the situation.

After reading my draft study in 2009, Phil explained how it had allowed him to access insights of which he might otherwise have been unaware:

It was fascinating to read through the whole thing as it falls together. The glitter ball showed me so many things [that] I didn’t know I didn’t know, which, for me, was always the point. I would never have had access to the cultural forces at play here … Understanding and reframing what is happening, and what we do, or deciding how to set-up, present and process cross-cultural communication in the form of a language programme, and whether that is even possible requires slightly more than a late night e-mail, but I am working on it. I just need to fix the Middle East peace process first. I really don’t stop learning new stuff from you all the time. Thanks.

(Phil ‘e-mail’ 29/09/2009)

Phil returned to the idea of the ‘glitter ball’ in a January 2011 interview:


What started out as a glitter ball now feels much bigger … it doesn’t feel like a glitter ball hitting random places anymore, it’s settled down, it’s like searchlights, spotlights, honing in on different areas. So on one side you’ve got culture, you’ve got language teaching, language acquisition theory … transnationalism, … and China, China’s position. I would only, left to my own devices, have been looking at teaching, and my own project. And with that study, that opens up. About me, about people, about China, about ideas. It was brilliant. I’m not just saying that because you’re here and we get on, but I really mean that, it was brilliant for me because it was stimulating for me. … I feel like I’m scratching the surface of some things … but I wouldn’t have even known there was a surface there. And those things are really enjoyable to think about, I find, but I can see that they’re also very difficult to experience.


Participants’ on-going involvement has been enormously beneficial to this study, as it has allowed for confirmation of intended meanings and changing perceptions throughout. However, it is important to consider the effects that involvement in the study had on the participants themselves. In order to gauge these effects, I asked participants about their experience of participating both in my June 2009 interviews (when they were still at PSU) and in January 2011 (when all but Ollie had moved into new jobs and lives).

In June 2009, several told me that they enjoyed participating and that the experience had been motivating and educational. Describing watching and discussing his own video-recorded lessons, Leo said that it had allowed him to notice a difference between what he saw on screen and his own self-perception of his practice. This, he said, helped him to ‘get out of the same ways of teaching … I was set in my ways’ (Leo ‘interview’ 11/06/2009). Similarly, Dan and Ollie both commented that their involvement had allowed them to discuss and develop their teaching and that the conversations had been very interesting. Lili put this last sentiment beautifully when she commented at the end of the student focus group meeting, ‘Finished? Too short. I find it very interesting, I am in high spirit’ (‘PSU Students’ focus group 12/06/2009).

Similarly, in January 2011, the participants’ descriptions of participating in the study centred around what they had learned from the experience, and how they had been able to perceive more ‘layers’ and viewpoints both through our interview conversations but also from reading the finished text. Much of this echoed the June 2009 comments:

It’s a reflective process because every time we meet you show me things that I once said and it makes me re-evaluate my status and my values and ideas. And I’m pleased to say that they keep changing and they keep moving forward, they’re not static. So I think it’s a really valuable thing.



[It was a] horrible but fascinating thing to go through. Exposing raw nerves. Things get hidden … the whole process uncovers those things, which is uncomfortable … the idealist in me wanted to create a working environment that was pleasant for people.


The process allowed me to speak about what I had been noticing and see if it actually made sense. … It’s been interesting for me to be on the other end of research. … These were pretty formative times for me … my life was changing. … And when I talk things out I figure things out. … So our interviews have been useful, to talk some of these things out, to figure out what I think about things and what I’m doing with my life.


These ideas are all in my mind and I get to express them and get to reflect on my own thinking. … Because I don’t really think about these things, or I don’t get to articulate it. … I would totally participate again in a different study. ... You should do one on career development for English teachers [laughs].


In addition, for Ryan, being part of a study that began its life as my PhD inspired him to consider undertaking a doctorate of his own:

[It was interesting] reading your thing and relating it to how I want my research to go. … It’s a nice example of how you write a doctorate, it’s not like I get a whole bunch of theses coming across my desk so it was good for me to look at how a thing like that is constructed. … I never had the idea [when I left Canada] that I was finished with university education … [a Master’s degree] is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. … Since I got into this program I’ve been looking at [doing a doctorate]. … It’s not only that I read the doctorate but I saw you do the whole process and I was involved during the whole process.


But not all the feedback on research involvement was entirely positive. After reading the draft study, Dan wrote:

I have to say that it captures the ‘PSU’ experience pretty accurately and thoroughly. In fact, it’s so vivid that I was immeasurably bummed out by the time I finished. … I thought I came off as a pitiable figure by the end of it. It wasn’t nice to revisit that headspace or to get an outside view of my downward trajectory.

(Dan ‘e-mail’ 05/10/2009)


While Dan’s is a positive evaluation of the study’s credibility, he himself seems to have suffered from revisiting the context. This is not an effect of the research though, but of Dan’s own unhappiness at PSU and reliving of the experience by reading my analysis. When I revisited Dan in January 2011 he said he had had no qualms about being involved in the study, only regrets that he had returned to PSU rather than staying in Cambodia in 2008.

Phil explains a similar discomfort he experienced through reading the text:

The student feedback sheets were never meant to be used as a measure of teaching success. … They were primarily meant to be a tool for the teacher to get some feedback on their own classroom performance … I don’t know who turned it into a ‘successful’ teacher league table … and the uncomfortable thing about reading that part was seeing the gap between the supportive tool they were meant to be and the tool for attack they became.

(Phil ‘e-mail’ 29/09/2009)

Again, though, these are not effects of the research so much as discomforts caused by the insights the study offers participants into their own experiences.

Ryan experienced a more significant discomfort during his reading, concerning the way he felt he was represented in the study. He says:

It seemed to be that the reason that I was smoking so much pot was because I was in PSU, but I’ve been smoking pot for years, like, since I was 16. … A lot of it made me look chauvinist. … It was pretty much, ‘I want to find a girl that wants to be barefoot and in the kitchen’ [laughs]. … But that’s not necessarily what I’m about. I mean, there’s tons of women in Asia that are more than happy to settle down with you and have kids. But that’s not necessarily my thing, you know what I mean?


This is important as it allows Ryan to ‘talk back’ to the text. My interpretation of his marijuana use at PSU was that it was related to relieving boredom and/or frustration. However, as Ryan says, it may be that this is simply the way he has always lived. As it is different from the way I live, and as I did not know Ryan before he started at PSU, I may have erroneously inferred, or exaggerated, a causal link. That said, I feel it is notable that Ryan has stopped using drugs now that he perceives more of a purpose in studying in Beijing. Additionally, Ryan himself connected his drug use to his perception of his work at PSU in 2009, saying, ‘the job’s really monotonous and boring. I’ve smoked a ton of dope this past two years’. (Ryan ‘interview’ 10/06/2009, quoted in Chapter 11). While the ‘real’ reasons for Ryan’s drug use during his time at PSU are unknowable (as even he, at different times, attributes different causes), the truth may be that his rationale was multifarious, and that I have oversimplified the situation by attributing it entirely to his frustration at PSU.


Similarly, I describe Ryan’s quotes and behaviour relating to women as ‘Orientalism in Taoist clothing’ (Chapter 9). But this is not necessarily Ryan’s chosen or only way of relating to women, and I am conscious of the role of contextualizing factors in influencing his behaviours in Shanghai. This is why it was important to meet Ryan again in 2011 and to see that there is much more to him, including more respect towards women, than I had perceived during our original interviews. However, this only strengthens my argument, in Chapter 9, that while the habitus that Western men bring to China may not be that of ‘men behaving badly’, circumstances may push a hedonistic, ‘laddish’ identity onto them, and that some struggle as this identity does not match their own sense of self. Ryan’s discomfort at the way I represented him in the text is indicative of exactly the identity disjunction described in Chapter 9.

So, for the participants, both taking part in the research and reading the text has been interesting, although at times rather confronting. In 2009, Karen also described having felt uncomfortable with my research presence at times:

[At first] you made me angry, because when I came out here [to China], well, I’d done real teaching before and I thought teaching was a real job. And then when I met you made me question things; you asked us about things we’d never thought of before. … But now I want to say thank you to you. … You’re probably the reason why I’m now working in marketing and why I’m hauling myself out of teaching with everything I’ve got, because … I thought about what you’d got out of us, about what a joke, basically, teaching English was at PSU. You got all of us talking about it as well. … We’d maybe never thought about questioning it before, but the fact you’d asked about our jobs made us think about it. … It would have come about sooner or later, that I would have questioned it, but you made me ask those questions earlier than maybe I would have. In the long term it’s a good thing. You’ve saved me a few years [laughs].


Karen’s comment made me wonder whether I had caused the ‘vipers’ nest’ of teacher criticism at PSU rather than simply witnessing it. As data is socially co-created, my very presence may have led the teachers to construct a different social and professional reality than they might have without me there.

This is the observer’s paradox, which refers to the influence of the observer on the research site. Beth described her perception of my influence at PSU:

I don’t think you caused the snake pit. … You’ve certainly got people talking about things. Because we sit around talking about ‘what were you talking to Phiona about?’ … It makes people think about these type of questions a bit more. ... But it was there before.


According to Beth and Karen, then, my presence made them question aspects of their working lives that they might not otherwise have thought about or discussed.


While this did not cause teachers’ low morale at PSU it may have given a platform and greater legitimacy to teachers’ critiques. By asking the participants about their professional role and identity, I legitimized the notion that the PSU role and teacher identity were not necessarily congruent. This may have opened the floodgates to criticism. However, I did not create these critiques. Due to the complexity of myriad factors, including Leo’s sometimes inappropriate managerial behaviour and Ryan and others’ stated instrumental motivations, it would be unconvincing to cite other cases (such as other universities without a participant researcher and with happy, motivated foreign teachers) and lay blame for the PSU teachers’ experiences with participants’ involvement in this study.

While I did not create these critiques, I do share many of the participants’ concerns about the way foreign teachers are constructed, and construct themselves, at PSU. The ‘fun’ with which they are associated is damaging for the intercultural skills development of everyone involved. Theirs is an unenviable role: they are largely unsupported, far from home, and under conflicting pressures. Their job is exhausting and demoralizing; they perceive they are disposable and interchangeable. To their great credit, many of them agonize over how to do their jobs better. Viewed from an insider perspective, these teachers are less colonizers than opportunists. They struggle with being shanghaied into performing roles expected of them, including roles that appear, from the outside, to be highly imperialistic. Of course, when I listen to Western men objectifying Chinese women or Ryan belittling my profession as unskilled labour, I die a little; these teachers give Westerners, and ELT, such a bad name! But I also understand how frustrating the situation seems to them and how some of their positionings, such as the ‘performing foreigner’ role, are not their own choices. Although the teachers have put themselves in this situation, they are also its victims.

The situation also raises the uncomfortable possibility that Phil’s classroom successes, and also my own, are attributable as much to our smiles as our strategies. This challenges the type of cultural and symbolic capital that we think we bring to the situation, and explains my feeling of discomfort that I struggled at PSU while ‘teachers’ like Ryan succeeded; my capital is simply not as valuable in the context as Ryan’s. PSU is a parallel ELT universe in which teacher education and experience are extraneous; entertainment is enough.

This explains the Borges quote on which I end this book. In researching the teachers’ experiences at PSU I have learned a lot about my own teacher effectiveness, or not, and also about my own identity. While I am an educated and experienced native English speaking English language teacher, I am simply not what PSU wants. This has the implication, outside of this context, that my own professional identity may be reduced and tainted by the experiences of the teachers whose stories are told in this research; all teachers’ identities are tarred by the brush of the PSU story. So by studying these marginal teachers at the very edges of ELT, I have contributed to knowledge both about the situation itself but also about the professional self-esteem of other teachers, like me. We are not the PSU teachers, but they are all of us.


Un hombre se propone la tarea de dibujar el mundo. A lo largo de los años puebla un espacio con imágines de provincias, de reinos, de montañas, de bahías, de naves, de islas, de peces, de habitaciones, de instrumentos, de astros, de caballos y de personas. Poco antes de morir, descubre que ese paciente laberinto de líneas traza la imagen de su cara.

(Jorge Luis Borges 1960: 111)

A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Just before he dies, he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.

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Index

aims of lessons 7, 30, 34, 84, 90, 92, 94–95, 107, 109–110, 113, 118–121, 128–132, 134, 136–137, 148, 152, 159–160, 195

apprenticeship of observation 14–15, 98assessment backwash 4, 20–21, 24, 103–105,

224–225authenticity 2, 28, 37, 59–60, 143, 154–156,

204

Beijing Olympics 52–53, 159beliefs about language 102–105, 148beliefs about language learning 19–21, 34,

37–38, 106, 112, 116, 120, 123Beth: biography 69, 88–89, 182, 184–184,

192, 233–235; teaching 92, 94–95, 119, 122–123, 126, 131; teaching context 97, 100, 106, 109, 187–189, 201–203, 205, 217; teaching of ‘culture’ 124, 151, 157–158, 204, 208, 218–219, 226; professional identity 138, 149, 154, 160–161, 184–185, 196–197, 215, 218–219; Westerners’ experiences in China 155–156, 162, 164, 169, 173–174, 177–179, 191, 229–231; on participating in the research 74, 249, 251

Blue Frog (bar) 175, 187building students’ confidence 23, 24, 92, 94,

104, 116, 152, 158

Cambodia 62, 72, 86, 132, 232–233, 242–243, 250

Canagarajah, Suresh 40, 43, 44, 197capital (Pierre Bourdieu): forms of 11, 40,

55, 162, 168, 191–193, 197; symbolic 180, 218, 252; transformation of capital 55, 223, 232–235, 238, 244–247; China capital 165–166, 222, 245; transnational capital 210–215, 240–247

careers see teachers’ careersCentre-Periphery 5, 42, 44–45CELTA 2, 6, 7, 33–35, 68, 70, 89, 91, 98,

121–122, 132, 137, 194–201, 212, 225CET4 examination 4, 20, 83, 104–105, 108,

224

Chinese language: use of during English classes 25, 46, 89, 90–91, 95, 105, 116, 118, 120, 128, 130–131, 133, 135–136, 145, 158, 164, ; foreigners’ learning and use of 11, 50, 71, 85–88, 109, 116, 158, 161–162, 165, 174, 176, 186, 213, 218–219, 233–235, 242, 244–245; understood as quantifiable 102, 109; as symbol of Chinese cultural superiority 49, 161–163

Chinese nationalism 5, 46, 51–54, 63, 162, 196–197

Chinese teachers of English 3, 19–21, 24, 46, 68, 79–80, 82, 89, 90–91, 94, 103, 104, 106, 123, 130, 136–137, 157, 163, 224, 227

class size 20, 83, 95–97, 100, 246classroom activities 20, 94, 111–118,

126–129, 132, 134, 136–137, 165, 202College English curriculum 19, 32, 102, 105College Entrance Exam (gaokao) 20, 81, 100coming out in class 184–185 communicative competence 20–21, 24, 102,

105, 163, 195, 225–227communicative language teaching (CLT):

contextual appropriateness 21–24, 36–38, 89–90, 104–105, 108, 198; implementation gap 20–21, 107; fusion with Chinese language teaching methods 23, 25; face validity of 23; resistance to 23, 36–37, 71, 104, 121, 137, 163

constituitive outside 12criticality in ELT 5, 12, 24, 39–46cultural imperialism 22, 24, 27–29, 41–44,

61, 220, 252culture: definitions of 16–19, 42–45, 49, 50,

59, ; teaching of 30–33, 124, 147–150, 151, 156–159, 184–185, 226–228; ‘Western culture’ as constructed in China 12, 25, 32–33, 48–53, 154–158, 175, 179; culture shock 55–56, 219–221 see also intercultural competence

cultures of learning: Confucian heritage 8, 15–17, 23, 100–102, 106; Socratic heritage 8, 23, 159

Index 275

curriculum 3, 14–16, 19, 21, 25, 32, 99, 102–105, 129, 130, 150, 158, 161, 166, 195–196, 199

curriculum ideology 18–19, 195

Dan: biography 69, 86, 214, 216–217, 242–244; teaching 90–91, 106, 111, 120, 123, 144, 152, 155, 161, 191, 201, 204, 216; staffroom culture 179, 187–190, 201–202, 213, 216; professional development 129, 131–132, 137, 139, 150, 160, 200, 206, 214, 242–244; on participating in the research 74, 248–250

DELTA 7, 137, 198, 200, 206–208, 220, 227–228

dinghy (metaphor) 204–207download and install (metaphor) 105, 196,

225dumbing down of teaching 119, 133DVD piracy 12, 114, 125

emotional labour 60, 155–156, 175, 179–180, 209, 238–240

English as a lingua franca 32, 157, 198, 228error identification/correction 37, 45, 76,

92, 104, 106, 118, 199 experiential learning 29–30, 55, 235,

244–247

foreigners in China: Othering of 11, 47–54, 63, 147–150, 154–156, 162, 196, 228–232; Othering by 150, 163–166, 221, 231, 239; conflation of different nationalities 48, 154–56, 160, 172, 218, 228–232; foreigners as working for China 53, 162–163, 228–232 see also ‘Self’ and ‘Other’

grammatical awareness 74–78, 92–94, 102, 106, 121–122, 236–237

grounded theory 8, 65–66guanxi 67, 101, 166, 215

habitus (Pierre Bourdieu) 10, 58, 70, 166, 176, 191, 217, 251

heavy drinking 27, 174, 185–189Hess buxiban language schools (Taiwan) 26,

69, 92, 203–204history of Shanghai 3, 39, 52Hofstede, Geert 17–18, 41Holliday, Adrian 12, 17, 25, 31, 40, 41, 45,

64, 228

identity: appropriation 173–176, 217–219, 220; attribution 62, 170–176, 211–215, 220

Intensive Reading 4, 20, 82, 123intercultural competence 3–4, 10, 16, 29–33,

37, 55–57, 150, 158–159, 166, 194, 196–197, 221–222, 225–228, 230–232, 252

interdisciplinarity 4–5

Japan: foreigners’ experiences in 31, 61; Chinese Othering of 51–52

Karen: biography 69, 86–87, 182, 185–186, 192, 210–211; teaching context 89, 96, 104–105, 112–113, 116, 122–123, 126, 129, 142, 145; career 138, 150, 210–211, 213–215, 243; professional identity 145, 149, 160–161, 165, 183, 187, 204–205, 212–213; Westerners’ experiences in China 149, 176, 180, 227; on participating in the research 251

Leo: biography 69, 85, 132, 240–242; Director of Studies role 82, 84, 94–95, 108, 121–122, 131, 139–140, 152–153, 156, 159, 179, 201–203, 206–207, 216–217; pressure on teachers to make lessons ‘fun’ 92, 125–126, 130, 142, 145–147, 205; own teaching 97, 115–116, 122–123, 128–129, 133, 164; reflections on the teaching context 100–101; Westerners’ experiences in China 175, 180–181, 228, 230; own identity negotiations 155–156, 176, 191; engagement with other teachers 187–192, 213, 240; on participating in the research 248–249

lesson planning see teachers meetingslesson repetitions 95–96, 134, 227 linguistic imperialism 40–41; see also cultural

imperialism

Mao Zedong 18, 47, 53multiculturalism in Shanghai 228–232

native speaker teachers 11, 25–26, 45–46

Occidentalism 46–50, 63, 150, 156, 170, 224

Ollie: biography 69, 74, 86, 91, 173, 182; teaching 74–79, 91, 95, 101, 113, 118, 123, 155, 157, 201, 227; professional identity 156, 204, 235–240, 243; transnational identity 211–212, 218, 229–231; on participating in the research 248

oral English 4, 21, 82, 108–110 Orientalism 42, 46–48, 51, 171, 191

participant research: researcher as a teacher 123, 134–137; positionality 70–80

patriotic education 49, 51–54Pennycook, Alistair 40–42performance: of ethnicity: performed

Westernness 12, 189–190, 241–242; of apparent self-confidence 169–179, 187–189

276 Index

Peru 26, 29, 40, 43, 70–71, 134PhD thesis 8, 64, 205, 249Phil: biography 69, 85, 192, 204–208, 231,

233, 246–247; professional role 67–68, 82, 122, 132, 188, 201–208, 217, 225; reflections on teaching in the context 97–98, 100, 101–102, 107, 110, 112, 116–120, 130, 139, 142–147, 153–154, 160, 200–201, 220; own teaching 122–123, 126, 197; Westerners’ experiences in China 179–180, 187–188; on participating in the research 74, 247–250

postcolonial resistance 42–46PPP lesson structure 34, 117–118, 200, 208 product versus process approaches 21,

105–108, 112–113, 118, 120–121, 136

race 50–51, 155–156rapport with students 35, 37, 90, 134, 142,

144, 152–153, 161, 162, 196–197, 199, 252

research method: gaining access 67; gaining acceptance 72–73; deepening the data 65, 74–78; ethics 73–74, 78–79, 178, 237, 248–251; credibility 72, 248–251

research questions 8Ryan: biography 69, 88, 156, 170–171,

178–180, 187–189, 191, 208; teaching 92–94, 112, 114, 123, 158–159, 191, 227; professional identity 95, 132, 154, 156, 161–163, 196–197, 202–204, 212–213, 215–217, 244–246, 252; reflections on teaching in the context 101, 109, 119; traveller identity 153, 212–213, 218, 222, 233; masculinity 171–172, 175, 178–182, 186; Westerners’ experiences in China 175–178, 219–220, 229, 231–232; on participating in the research 249–251

salaries 29, 82, 152–153, 204, 235Self and Other 47–50, 51–54, 71, 79, 130,

136, 141–143, 147–150, 154–156, 160, 163–166, 169, 228–232, 239

separation of English courses 4, 20, 199sex with students 73, 155, 173, 176–177,

179, 226 sex workers, use of 62, 175, 177–178 shanghai (verb) 1Sichuan earthquake 53, 149smoking marijuana 62, 169, 191, 212–214,

216, 244–245, 250social imaginary of Shanghai 52, 63, 220,

228–232speaking skills development 20, 82–83,

93–94, 102–105, 107–109, 111–113, 119

staffroom culture 187–190stereotypes of Westerners 49–50, 142,

155–156student evaluations of teachers 35–36, 69,

125, 136–137, 140, 143–147, 156, 159–161, 166, 191, 196, 206, 250

student presentations in class 114–116, 128–129

student resistance 43–44, 118–120, 121, 130–131, 145

symbolic interactionism 57, 147–150

teacher development: teacher support at PSU 94–95, 121–122, 200–208, 225, 235–237; de-skilling 137–140, 160–161

teacher education versus training 6teacher expertise 33–36teacher job description 110, 129–131, 145,

159–161, 226–228teacher qualifications 5, 26, 88–94, 243teacher recruitment 25–26, 82, 151–154,

156teacher success versus effectiveness 143–147,

161–163, 194–197teachers flirting with students 159, 161–162,

177–178, 192–193 teachers’ meetings 83, 94–95, 97, 202teachers’ morale 131–134, 190–191,

215–217, 219–221teachers’ motivations 4, 26–30, 85–88, 138,

153–154, 210–213terminology in ELT 12–13testing: of oral English 83–84, 93–94;

discrete-item 20–21, 102–105textbooks 31, 53, 83–84, 94, 97, 117–118,

121, 131, 148, 158–159, 200, 207, 228Thailand 86, 88, 91, 132, 152, 223, 237,

242the West, as constructed in China see culturetransnationalism 29, 54–57, 71–72,

217–219, 228–232Trinity Cert TESOL 33, 85, 122, 136, 198,

199

unqualified native speaker ‘teachers’ 25, 92–94

Vietnam 44, 140, 242

Western men 47, 61–63, 168–180, 187–189Western women 47, 63, 180–187Whiteness 5, 11–12, 31, 44, 48–51, 54, 61,

73, 153, 155, 162–163, 169–172, 175, 181, 186–190, 196, 221, 235

Xintiandi (entertainment complex) 231

Zhang Zhidong 3

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