English language teacher learning in professional learning communities: a case study of a Chinese secondary school

ABSTRACT

Through a discourse analysis of the qualitative data collected in an ethnographic approach, this study investigates learning emerging in an English teachers’ professional learning community (PLC) at a Chinese secondary school in Shanghai. It explores the discourse features of situated interactions in two types of typical events occurring regularly in this PLC, participant roles in the interactions, and how learning occurs in the community. This study reveals that different foci and functions of the meetings largely determined the discourse features, and that community members tended to take different roles and demonstrate different aspects of their identity. Despite the differences, the two meetings both had a high percentage of episodes of pedagogical reasoning(EPRs) and low rate of distributed participation per episode. It is implied that both meetings were conducive to teacher learning, but the learning foci (topics covered in the two meetings) were different. More distributed participation may be needed to encourage collaborative learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher learning community
• situated interaction
• discourse features
• discursive construction of knowledge

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Key schools at the municipal level have the highest enrolment requirements, whereas ordinary schools have the lowest requirements.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in P. R. China [Grant number 2018ECNU-QKT003].