Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Constraints Preventing Chinese Efl Teachers From Putting Their Stated Beliefs Into Teaching Practice, Lei-Min Shi, Janine Delahunty, Xiaoping Gao

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

In China, developing students' overall communicative competence was set as the central goal of the current college English curriculum requirements since 2004. However, this goal has remained largely unfulfilled, particularly with regard to writing competence. This study proposes that the genrebased pedagogy in systemic functional linguistics may be the key to achieve this national curriculum goal. After teachers were trained in this pedagogy, through designed workshops for teacher development, this research examined possible changes in teachers' stated beliefs about effective writing pedagogy and actual teaching practices. The findings from classroom observations and teachers' self-reports suggest that even though all teacher …