Complexities of Identity Formation 2

Complexities of Identity Formation: A narrative Inquiry of an EFL Teacher by Amy B. M. Tsui (2007)

Summary
Minfang is a successful English learner as well as a successful English teacher in China. There was a gap between the spirit of Communicative language teaching (CLT) and his belief. CLT was introduced from the West in order to develop Chinese communicative competence and it had a prestige as a new method. Chinese people had a difficulty with English conversation even after 900 hours of learning, though they tended to be good at writing and grammar. He could not adopt CLT because it was against the Chinese Confucian learning culture. In the class, he needed to change to different personae and to express opinions spontaneously. In addition, he did not like to do communicative activities in groups. As a result, he did not have motivation of studying CLT. He created his own learning style and succeeded in developing communicative competence, not because of CLT, but because of his hard work after class. Through his experience as a learner, he had an idea that traditional method (TM) worked better than CLT.

As a teacher, he was assigned to teach listening skills for the first two years. He gave a lot of interactive activities in his class because of the spirit of CLT. But it did not work for his students and he started to teach in his own way based on TM. His approach went well and in the third year he was assigned to teach the CLT course which was considered to be important. He kept teaching in his own approach in the CLT course and students liked it. However, from inspectors’ point of view, he was a faked CLT practitioner because he taught in eclectic approach. As his status advanced, he regarded himself as a member of the department, but he became very cautious about what he said because he was very influential both inside and outside the department.

After three year of teaching, he started a postgraduate course in EFL teaching. He found the misconception of CLT and his eclectic approach based in Confucian culture was not wrong. After he finished the sixth year, he left the institution in order to get a doctoral degree in the United Kingdom. He felt that empirical study in a classroom was important and it took time to decide how to teach suitably.