Being and becoming an English for specific purposes (ESP) teacher in a Chinese university : an ethnographic study

Abstract

This thesis reports the outcome of an ethnographic study on how teachers of English for specific purposes (ESP) construct their professional identities, in a Chinese university. The study draws on the sociocultural perspective, and had two stages of data collection. In the first stage, eight ESP teachers were interviewed about their biographical accounts, particularly learning, teaching and workplace experiences. In the second stage, I collected multiple types of data about three teachers’ professional lives over an academic semester in the selected university, including unstructured interview data, observation data and artifacts. Two of the cases are presented in this thesis. This ethnographic approach allowed the study to yield a holistic understanding of the participants’ teacher, researcher and practitioner identities, as mediated by the contextual conditions. The study reveals that many of them were recruited by the University to teach ESP courses but were later required to redefine their professional identities to be teacher-scholars. Because of the ESP expertise, they also played a key role in the University-Company partnerships and took on ESP practitioner identity in University-Company partnerships to be good academic citizens. The study concludes that the participants’ identity construction was primarily subject to the changing institutional setting, including the shifting meanings of ESP competence and disintegration of ESP professional community. In addition, the societal context, particularly the societal demand for ESP specialists, exerted indirect but positive effect on identity construction. Based on the findings, the study lends support to an expanded notion of professional development that language teachers should draw on to empower themselves. ESP teachers need to mobilize societal discourse and resources of the broader academic community at macro level and also prior experience at micro level for the construction of professional identities, which may help them transcend the institutional constraints at meso level. Thus ESP teachers need to reflect on what contextual and personal resources are available to facilitate professional development. Further research is needed to examine the role of contextual mediation in teachers’ identity construction, which may inform teacher educators to provide locally responsive support to ESP teachers’ professional development in particular contexts.