A bilingual second language teacher teaching bilingually : a self-study

Abstract

I was engaged as a Volunteer Teacher-Researcher (VTR) of Mandarin in New South Wales Department of Education and Training (NSW DET) schools as part of a partnership between the NSW DET (Western Sydney Region), Ningbo Municipal Education Bureau (NMEB) and the Centre for Educational Research, the University of Western Sydney (UWS). As a bilingual teacher with no previous educational background teaching Mandarin bilingually in NSW, I was concerned to document and analyse my experiences through a self-study research method and to investigate my professional learning as a beginning second language (L2) teacher. Self-study is a burgeoning area of teacher education and teacher research. My research question is the following: What is it like to be a bilingual teacher teaching a second language (L2) in a first language (L1) environment, but where this L1 is my L2? Sources of data collected for this study included: programming and planning notes, documents from methodology training courses, reflection journals, classroom observations, students' written feedback and test results, and interviews with teachers. I also drew on memories of my prior learning experiences as a school- and tertiary-level learner of English in Zhejiang Province, China. Content analysis was adopted to analyse the evidence in this study. The theoretical interpretation draws on the work of Loughran (2004 & 2005) and Hamilton (1998) in self-study, as well as comparisons and contrasts with current trends in L2 education and beginning teaching research, such as the work of Watzke (2007), Marland (2007) and Arends (2004). Key categories of analysis, including identity, experiencing a mentoring relationship, language class size, classroom management and impacts of pre-existing knowledge, emerged as significant evidence from the analysis of my data. In general my development trend was consistent with previous research in the literature about beginning teaching. The process of becoming a teacher-researcher through self-study was professional, beneficial and meaningful.

Date of Award	2010
Original language	English