Early career English teachers’ professional commitment change: a Macau study

ABSTRACT

While the role of professional commitment in retaining early career teachers has been widely acknowledged in the literature, few studies have examined the commitment change of early career teachers over time. Informed by a developmental perspective, this study explores three early career English teachers’ commitment change across the teacher education programme, the practicum, the first year, and the second year in teaching. Drawing on data from in-depth individual life history interviews, this study reveals how the participants’ commitment shifted among four commitment levels, i.e., committed passionate, committed compromiser, undecided, and uncommitted. The findings also show that such commitment change over time is an ongoing interaction between individual’s self-efficacy, outcome expectation and the professional autonomy and social support afforded by institutional contexts. These findings call for a need to take teacher commitment as a multidimensional construct and to how early career teachers’ commitment to teaching could be promoted over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching commitment
• teacher education
• teaching practicum
• change

Acknowledgments

We want to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. Special thanks to our participants for making this study possible.

Ethics statement included in body of manuscript

Ethical safeguards were adopted to enhance the trustworthiness of the data collected. As university-based researchers, we were not the participants’ teachers and this helped build up an equal relationship with them. We treated the participants with respect and informed them clearly of their rights and of all the data collection procedures.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the MYRG2018-00096-FED, University of Macau.

Notes on contributors

Shulin Yu

Shulin Yu is Assistant Professor at Faculty of Education, University of Macau. His research interests include second language education and teacher education.

Lianjiang Jiang

Lianjiang Jiang is Postdoctoral fellow at Faculty of Education, University of Macau. He is also Associate Professor at Jimei University.

Wan Soi Kei

Wan Soi Kei is an English teacher at Chan Sui Ki Perpetual Help College, Macau. Her research interests focus on second language teacher education.