Chinese as a Foreign Language Teachers in New Zealand Secondary Schools: Teachers’ Beliefs and Practices With Regard to Grammar Teaching

Abstract

Studies of teachers’ beliefs and practices have attracted increasing research attention in the field of second-language education. However, most studies have been conducted with teachers of English; little has been reported on teachers who teach Chinese to speakers of other languages. The present study set out to address this gap by investigating Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) teachers’ beliefs and practices in New Zealand secondary schools, with a particular focus on grammar teaching. The study was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, a web-based questionnaire provided a general overview of 34 teachers’ beliefs about the teaching of grammar in the CFL context. In the second phase, four native Chinese teachers and three nonnative Chinese teachers were invited to participate further in the multiple case studies. Various sources of data were collected from interviews, classroom observations, and documents, which aimed to further probe into individual teachers’ belief systems, capture teachers’ actual grammar-teaching practices and explore how beliefs and practices were related within the context. The results of this research indicated that teachers held a range of beliefs, and these beliefs were shaped and influenced by their personal experiences, knowledge base and interpretation of the context. With regard to grammar teaching, the teachers, irrespective of their language backgrounds, generally embraced the communicative language teaching (CLT) approach and perceived that grammar teaching should be completed in a communicative context through meaningful activities. However, observational data showed that teachers often failed to balance grammar and communication; grammar teaching was treated as dealing with a set of structures at the sentence level. The data analysis further disclosed that teachers’ decisions and classroom activities were determined by the interaction within teachers’ belief systems and between beliefs and the contextual factors. Moreover, the various contextual factors interacted with each other; therefore, understanding teachers’ beliefs and practices should go beyond the immediate classroom context and take into account the surrounding contexts, such as school management and the national curriculum. The study has contributed to the existing literature in offering an origin framework that extends the current understanding of the complex and interactive relationship between beliefs, practices and contexts. The implications of this research are also expected to benefit future teacher education and professional development programmes.