Decolonialization in the Concrete: Honoring the Expertise of Local Teachers in EFL Contexts

This reports a study of a set of experienced rural Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) secondary school teachers enrolled in a professional-development training program offered at a major Canadian university. The program’s purpose was to help the participants develop a deeper understanding of how to adapt alternative approaches to EFL pedagogy to local conditions. Teachers in foreign English language teaching and learning contexts face diverse challenges such as large class sizes, low student motivation, and limited classroom resources. English instruction in China has been dominated by teacher-fronted and grammar-focused pedagogy (Zhang and Li in Paper Presented May 2014 at International Conference on Education, Language, Art and Intercultural Communication (ICELAIC 2014), 2014). These conditions have resulted in significant challenges in terms of the development of English oral proficiency and in overall classroom management. Although some jurisdictions (such as the Shanghai School District) in China have recently experimented with assessment techniques that are alternatives to the traditional Gaokao college and university entrance examinations, these changes have yet to be felt in rural China. The data demonstrate that successful teacher training in this context requires carefully listening to participants so as to provide the theoretical knowledge and exposure to practical classroom treatment options so that they can exercise, in the interests of decolonialization, the agency to assess, appropriate, and apply what they see fit for their unique contexts. The findings also demonstrate that teacher trainers have much to learn from the participants in professional development training. As I note below, the follow up research in China showed that the participants made sophisticated choices in view of local contexts and that these local contexts were important to understand.