Towards An Understanding Of EFL Teacher Collaboration In Higher Education

Individualism in teacher culture characterized by teacher isolation,led to few opportunities of professional interaction among the teachers,and caused impediments to curriculum implementation.Since the 1980s,its opposite,i.e.teacher collaboration received growing attention from educational reformers and teacher educators as the key to educational change.Evidence of the benefits of teacher collaboration on the level of students,teachers as well as the school in previous studies supports the promotion of teacher collaboration.Authentic collaboration among teachers should be established on equal,open and supportive relationships among colleagues,oriented at teachers' professional development,in which teachers aim at teaching and research improvement by means of honest communication,mutual engagement,sharing resource,etc.,for the purpose of achieving individual and collective development.In spite of the top-down requirements and known benefits of teacher collaboration,it was reported that teachers in higher education were not collaborating in a satisfactory way.Against the backdrop of improving teaching quality and emphasizing teachers'continuing professional development at universities,it is of importance to examine how university teachers collaborate with their colleague in the real sense.This study seeks to investigate the forms of collaboration among EFL teachers in higher education and the influencing factors of their collaboration,with the focus on collaboration experienced by three EFL teachers within one Teaching and Research Group(TRG)in a Chinese university.Drawing on data collected through in-depth interviews,filed observation and online chatting records,a qualitative study was conducted to identify the forms of collaboration and analyze the influencing factors.There are two major findings:firstly,these teachers take the forms of storytelling with"besties",help-seeking from the experienced,sharing as ritual events,and joint work by contrivance including classroom observation during the Inspection Week and project-based teamwork.Secondly,the influencing factors include teacher agency,organization structures and department culture.This study uncovered the actual performance of EFL teacher collaboration in higher education,and implications at three levels were drawn to foster university teacher collaboration:firstly,teachers themselves should strengthen their awareness of collaboration and improve their collaborative abilities,taking an active part in collaboration and seeking deeper-level collaboration.Secondly,teacher leaders should keep closer relationships with the other teachers to better understand their actual collaborative needs and professional development schemes,and also create structural conditions for collaboration to occur;thirdly,the department management should work on building a more collaborative teacher culture,cultivate teachers' sense of community and belonging,with necessary reforms on the appraisal system and incentive mechanism to elicit teacher collaboration.