Becoming A Teacher Is A Journey For A Lifetime--The Biography Of An EFL Teacher In A Chinese University

Over the last two decades, there has been a growing interest amongst academics in the lives and work of teachers in industrialized countries. Traditional approaches to teacher preparation and development have been criticized for their inabilities to meet the professional learning needs of teaching practitioners, while the impact of teachers' own biographies on training processes and on curriculum development and implementation has been increasingly recognized. Within this new paradigm, how teachers learn or develop has become as important as what teachers learn.This biographical inquiry endeavors to explore in a holistic sense what the long-term experience of becoming a teacher "is like" based on the longitudinal study of an EFL teacher in a Chinese university. Specifically, it aims to answer the following two questions:1) How does the subject change and develop during the journey of becoming a teacher? 2) How do the things that happened during the journey affect the subject's present teaching?This study lasts for almost one year (from September 2008 to September 2009). The subject (Mr. Hu) is a Comprehensive English Course teacher at a normal university. The research methods include case study, biography, and narrative inquiry. Data are collected from classroom observation, formal interview, reflective journals, informal conversations, classroom written artifacts, e-mail letters, and students' comments. The subject's biographical account, consisting of four series of stories (stories about current practice, stories about childhood, stories about youth, stories about beginning years of being a teacher), emerged as a result of analyzing the above data.Drawing on data from detailed case study of the subject's life stories, the study produces five themes as regards the nature of teacher development:1) Teacher's life history and teacher professional development; 2) Career stages of being a teacher; 3) Factors contributing to teacher change and development; 4) Obstacles to Mr. Hu's growth; 5) EFL teacher's personal practical knowledge. The in-depth analysis of the themes provides compelling evidence that teacher development or change is a dynamic process with contexts, students, tasks, identities interacting with each other, so it is quite significant to know about the person the teacher is for understanding this process. Teaching can be considered as personal and situational in that teachers are affected by their previous life experience and background and will develop their own beliefs and behaviors of teaching.From this study, life experiences and years of teaching experience and professional development mingle together to change and enhance his knowledge of teaching and resulting classroom practice. By closely studying the path of one teacher's growth and teaching, that of all teachers can be illuminated. Implications are offered for teachers' better development and for future research.