Class observations were conducted two times in 2019. The purpose of class
observations were to understand how the buxiban teacher participant and the researcher as a school teacher present their English teaching in their own teaching context between the two teachers.
The first class observation on a two-hour grammar class was conducted in January in 2019, which took place in Mill’s buxiban. During the observation, I paid attention to the interaction between Mill and his students－what language he used in class and how he guided his students to meet his teaching goal. Through the observation, I knew how Mill designed his lesson, his teaching materials and discovered his teaching strategies, which reflected the participant’s own teaching philosophy.
The second class observation took place in October in 2019. In the second class observation, I invited Mill to observe one of my classes and then have a follow-up dialogue with him to know his thoughts about school teaching. All the data was collected primarily by means of a paper-and-pencil.
Data Analysis
In order to enhance credibility of this study, I invited Mill to read all the transcription as a form of member checking (Shenton, 2004). And I noted down my reflection as
reflective commentary to monitor my own initial impression of each data (Shenton, 2004).
Data analysis of this study was performed in three stages. The first stage was the holistic-content analysis procedure (Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach & Zilber, 1998). According to Lieblich et al. (1998), holistic-content analysis is a way to analyze narrative materials which sees the story as a whole and the theme will be generated from it after it has read by the researcher many times. Thus, after collecting Mill’s English learning history
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narrative, conducting the first two interviews about Mill’s English learning background and his working experiences, I transcribed the narrative data, printed out the
transcriptions, read them several times and marked the texts for key concepts (categories).
Then, I derived the themes from those key concepts (Iyengar, 2014). Based on the categories, I coded three interviews. Through this process, I constructed a profile of how Mill became a teacher he is now and tried to address the research question.
In the second stage, I explored Mill’s teaching practice based on the narrative data and the first three interviews. I used critical event analysis (Webster & Mertova, 2007) to identify life-changing events that had consequences and impacted his teaching practice.
According to Webster & Mertova (2007), critical events are those “unplanned and unanticipated events (p. 83)” that happened in one person’s life which cause “life-changing consequences (p. 83).” These life-“life-changing consequences “are only identified after the event (p.83)” and also, during the events, the person has “strong emotional involvement (p.83).” Through the dialogues between Mill and me, I tried to explore our discussion about our views toward English teachers, English teaching, and school and buxiban teaching systems. As Davies and Harré (1990) proposed, “The words the speaker chooses inevitably contain images and metaphors which both assume and invoke the ways of being that the participants take themselves to be involved in.” Through critical event analysis, what Mill said in our dialogues could be regarded as how he positioned himself which helped me to understand what Mill thinks about his teaching practice and his unique contributions and addressed to the research question.
In the final stage, again, I used critical event analysis (Webster & Mertova, 2007) and took the data from the previous stages to explore how the shifts that we each experienced in our teaching and development reflected our self-positioning in the teaching system, focusing on who the participant thought he was in our discussions. By
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the narrative data, interviews and our dialogues, how we position each other would be emerged and the research question “How does the participant position himself and how does he perceive others’ positioning in the overall Taiwanese educational context?” was addressed.
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This chapter traces Mill’s journey to become an English teacher and attempts to understand what he think about his teaching practice and his unique contributions. In this chapter, I present Mill’s experiences as two topics. The first one is Mill’s English learning journey, which discusses how his English learning experiences is reflected in his current teaching. The second is Mill’s English teaching experiences, which provides an
understanding of his English teaching belief. This part also include an observation of Mill’s classroom, which reveals what it is like in Mill’s teaching environment. Through these two topics, the route of how Mill became a buxiban English teacher and how he thought about his teaching practice and unique contributions are constructed.
Mill’s English Learning Journey
Elementary school－The enlightenment
“It was him, a foreign teacher in a children’s English learning buxiban, who enlightened me to learn English.” Mill described how the teacher made an effort to delight the children during the class, “the most impressive was that he would sweat in class.” “All of his gestures were so dramatic…when he said, ‘tall’, ‘short’, ‘big’,
‘little’…he would behave in an extremely exaggerated way.” Mill did not care what the teacher taught, and he did not remember what he had learned in class. All he could remember was that it was an interesting class. “The teacher made me realize that we should pay our sweat, expression, action, voice and professionalism if we want to be impressive.”
When Mill talked about this experience, his eyes glowed with excitement and he was amazed by the teacher’s attitude and his devotion. Although Mill did not understand any