| This dissertation presents an interpretive study of teacher change through international professional development in the field of EFL teaching. The participants of this multiple case study are nine secondary school English as a foreign language instructors from Fujian Province, China, who as part of a regional professional development initiative, were selected along with fourteen of their colleagues to participate in a professional development program on communicative language teaching methodology in Canada. Through interviews and videotaped lessons of teachers in both in Canada and in China six months later, this qualitative study aimed to capture the lasting impact of the participants' overseas experiences on their personal and professional lives after returning home.; This dissertation uses a unique approach to cross-cultural, cross-language research. A bilingual research team conducted semi-structured interviews in a free-flow manner between both Chinese and English. The aim of this methodology was to create a rich enough context for participants to reflect insightfully on their experiences and on the complexity of change. Emergent themes of the resulting texts were selected on the degree of their explanatory power for interpreting the breath of the participants' experiences in the four areas of inquiry: cultural knowledge and understanding; personal and professional identity; pedagogical knowledge; and oral language proficiency for teaching. Videotaped samples of lessons given by the participating teachers in Canada during the course and in China in their classrooms six months later provided a means from which to analyse changes to the teachers' oral language proficiency over time and in two distinct contexts.; The findings of this study present a broad range of altered perspectives and change attributed by the participating teachers' to their overseas experiences in Canada. The main themes identified in the area of cultural knowledge were literacy practices, preserving cultural information, protecting the environment, individualism - personal choice and critical thinking, social tolerance and respect for others, and the fundamental commonality of human nature and family life around the world. In the area of personal identity, the teachers described feelings of enhanced self-confidence and altered worldviews. A change to the professional identities of the teachers included a heightened sense of professional responsibility to use what they had learned overseas to improve the state of English teaching within their schools and their province. The teachers' understanding of communicative language teaching described transformational change - the majority of teachers expressed changes to their pedagogical knowledge that extended beyond the acquisition of new information to permanently altered perspectives of themselves as learners and teachers. In the area of oral language proficiency for teaching, the teachers reported that they felt they had made gains in their ability to communicate in English as a result of using the language for everyday purposes while in Canada, and through using English in the professional development course. However, after six months in their home country, changes to the teachers' self-assessed English language proficiency were described as having regressed or dissipated completely. Comparisons of the language samples taken in Canada and in China found an insignificant difference in the teachers' oral language proficiency for teaching over time and between the two contexts.; This cross-cultural, cross-language research endeavour in which data was collected from two countries, in two distinct contexts, and through two languages, identifies significant points of interface between the teachers' experiences in the West and their lives in the East. The findings suggest interpretive research in bicultural, bilingual contexts is highly enriched by establishing equality in the power of both languages to contrib... |
