11. Technology and Curricular Reform in China: A Case Study

Technology and Curricular Reform in China: A Case Study
By Xu Fang and Mark Warschauer 2004

Summary: This paper reports on a five-year study (1998-2003) of a technology-enhanced ELT reform project at a university in eastern China. The study explored two principal research questions:
1. Teaching and learning: How did the reform program affect the English teaching and learning process and outcomes within the classes that implemented it?
2. To what extent was the reform effort able to take hold, and what barriers or obstacles existed to it doing so?

Projects were generally based on long-distance collaborative writing with overseas partners, conducted over the Internet. For example, in a reform section of Comprehensive English taught in 1998, students engaged in two main collaborations:
(1) an international exchange with ESOL students in the US, France, and Ukraine called the Cities Project, in which students exchanged writing about their city with a long-distance partner and then developed a group presentation based on what they learned and
(2) a writing exchange with a university in the US focusing on discussion of local culture. At the end of the class, students made a group presentation discussing an aspect of international culture they investigated through the exchange.

Sources of Data
• participant observation [once or twice a semester]
• informal interviews (with students in the two focus classes)
• student surveys (in the two focus classes)
• analysis of student texts (e.g.,student-student and student-teacher e-mail communications both in-class and out-of-class
• examination of finished project products (e.g., final project, Web page and PowerPoint presentation files, student research reports, and self-evaluation
• Additional data came from extensive personal communications in the School, including with graduate and undergraduate student participants, staff, faculty members and administrators.

Data Analysis
• Data analysis techniques were drawn principally from ethnographic and sociolinguistic research. >>> pattern matching (Miles & Huberman, 1994; Spradley, 1980) to interpret the general patterns in the gains of the student learning process and outcomes and direct interpretation (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Stake, 1995) and I-statement analysis (Gee, 1999, 2000) to analyze interview data and student texts. The latter method examines the ways in which people speak in the first person, referring, for example, to their actions, successes, abilities, or constraints, and thus fashion themselves as a person of a particular sort or type through language.

Discrepancy
• Many more faculty were becoming familiar with technology, as the percentage of faculty with home access to computers and the Internet grew from less than 25% in 1998 to greater than 90% in 2003. These improved conditions were reflected in a sharp increase in faculty using technology in their classes but not in their teaching revised courses incorporating project-based learning. Rather, teachers made minor revisions to their regular course structure, by making use of downloaded audio material from the Internet, using presentation software during their lectures, or offering supplementary reading material online.

Researcher’s Remark
The discrepancies might stem from deeply-held cultural beliefs about the nature of knowledge, how teaching should occur, and how students should learn—all reinforced by educational systems that reward traditional forms of instruction—tend to mitigate against radical reform in teaching and learning.
• Rather, when teachers implement innovations, they tend to do so at the margin of instruction, leaving core relationships and processes in place.
• The study thus suggests that this Chinese university, and perhaps others, is not yet ready for the kind of wholesale curricular reform that this project entailed.
• It is not unlikely that the educational landscape may also change in the coming decades, just as it is changing in other Asian countries, such as Singapore.



Relevance: It took five years to collect the data of the technology-enhanced English language instruction in a Chinese context. The project was collaboratively carried out between tertiary institutions and the IT facilities were provided. Tertiary instructors were given trainings and workshops to use the IT to enhance their instruction. However, the finding shows the discrepancies between the technology availability and the instructional reform. In my opinion, teacher cognition about using the IT in EFL instruction should be investigated in order to provide more insights to the sociocultural settings in English language instruction in China. The IT in language classroom is not a ready-to-use kit for every one. Teachers' pedagogy orientation and professional practice gained from everyday classroom experience and previous teaching programs are very influential on the changes of their instructional behaviour. Apart from the data collected from the learners' interviews, there should have been reflections from the teachers as well.