Becoming a 'good' Chinese language teacher: Professional identity, learning experience and teaching culture

Discover what Chinese language teachers experience while teaching Chinese as a foreign language (abbreviated to CFL) at Danish universities. Are they teaching CFL in a ‘Chinese’ way? Are they teaching CFL in a ‘Danish’ way? Focusing on professional identities, this PhD project explores the relationship among teachers’ beliefs, prior CFL-related experiences and the influence of different teaching cultures. Six native-speaker teachers of Chinese and four non-native-speaker teachers of Chinese from three Danish universities joined the project. Through a qualitative study made up of researcher’s journals, classroom observations and semi-structured interviews over four years (2011-2015), the author explains the process of being and becoming ‘good’ Chinese language teachers in a Danish educational setting, concentrating on the factors which are associated with influencing the construction of teacher identity. Filled with teachers’ narration and their personal reflections, the project argues that claiming what ‘Chinese-styled teaching’ or ‘Danish-styled teaching’ entails will serve these teachers well in that they opt for an alternative identity and an alternative form of teaching in an intercultural context.