Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Articulating and implementing national development plans (ndp s) has been a popular approach taken by most governments in the world in response to the opportunities and challenges occurring in domestic and international spheres. Since the 2000s the Taiwanese government has launched a series of ndp s with different goals, foci, and tactical approaches. This paper adopts a retrospective lens to examine how English language education has been strategically situated in the ndp s of Taiwan and reflects on both the alignments and misalignments between the unveiled goals of the ndp s and the policies pertaining to English language education of the nation over the last two decades. In the pursuit of the goals of the contemporary ndp of the nation, strategic remodelling of teacher education programmes is needed through: (1) expanding bilingual/all-English programmes within departments; (2) advocating departmental interaction within/across teacher training institutes; and (3) optimising training and teaching opportunities for foreign students.

Teachers' professional identity influences the way they think and teach. For pre-service non-native English speaking teachers (NNESTs), they are at the crucial stage of constructing self-image and self-perception as English language teaching (ELT) professionals, their beliefs about English teaching and learning and their attitudes towards changing teaching contexts. Applying a closed-ended questionnaire and in-depth interviews, this study investigated the impact of Native English Speaking Teachers (NESTs) on 258 pre-service NNESTs' professional identity in Taiwan through the lens of social relationality. The results show that NESTs as significant "others" to the participants have brought conflicting discourses to the ELT profession (the micro-social context) and the policy discourse and the society (the macrosocial context). In the micro-social context, the participants encounter contradictory discourses brought by the presence of NESTs in terms of what the participants can offer as opposed to what ideal English teachers should possess. In the macro-social context, the participants face competing discourses caused by the presence of NESTs, in terms of what constitutes good teaching practice, as opposed to what is valued by the government and the major stakeholders in the society. Arguably, the participants' professional identity is shaped through the process of interpreting and conjoining these contradictory and competing discourses. To help pre-service NNESTs construct a positive professional identity to support their professional lives, reforms in teacher education programs should focus on developing the teachers' "non-native" status into resources for ascertaining the needs of the teaching contexts they are operating within.

The status of English as a global language has played a significant role in contemporary language education policies across the world. In East Asia, the hegemony of English has been reflected in a number of central governments' policies of recruiting native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) to participate in English language education. This paper focuses on the NESTs recruitment policies in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan with the aim of examining how teacher professionalism is represented in these policy discourses and how this conceived teacher professionalism impacts on English teaching and learning in these countries. Through the analysis of policy texts and documents, we argue that teacher professionalism has been assigned a different agenda by the governments who subscribe to "native speaker norms" and legitimise unqualified and inexperienced NESTs in the profession of English language teaching (ELT). These antiprofessionalism policies have not achieved the intended consequence of improving students' English proficiency, but have instead resulted in the unintended consequences of damaging the quality of English instruction and jeopardising the professional identity of local non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) in these countries. The results reveal an urgent need to evaluate the effectiveness of these NEST recruitment programmes.