A beginning Mandarin teacher researcher's exploration of her own professional development through classroom teaching : a self study

Abstract

This research explored the teacher-researcher's professional development as a beginning Mandarin teacher in terms of teaching strategies and language skills. She recorded the critical problems and dilemmas she met, and wrote down how she dealt with them and how she figured out ways to solve them. Specifically, she explored her own teaching skills through teaching practice in three areas: how to engage students, how to build new knowledge and how to make students' knowledge transformation occur. Self-study was applied as the research method in this study. The main data in this research was collected from the teacher-researcher's self-reflection journals. In order to triangulate the research and increase the validity, data were also gathered from other channels: interviews of the classroom teacher and students as well as other written documents. The written documents included students' sample work, surveys and the classroom teachers' observation forms. Thematic analysis was selected to conduct the whole analysing process, including organizing, categorizing, coding and interpreting. Throughout the research, efforts were made to explore better ways to engage students' Chinese language learning in class, build students' Chinese language knowledge and make their language knowledge transfer occur. Reflecting upon data and browsing through literature, three key propositions emerged. Overall, this study contributes knowledge about Chinese teaching, and it benefits beginning teachers as well as Chinese teachers in Australia.

Date of Award	2015
Original language	English