In this study, seven elementary school English teachers in Pingtung County were interviewed to recount their past experiences of sharing knowledge. According to their responses, we can clearly see that they have involved in knowledge sharing in both formal and informal ways, such as, when chatting with colleagues casually, through various kinds of Internet resources, by attending workshops or seminars, or during the school meetings. They also reported that they have gained three benefits from such sharing experiences: 1) broadening their personal horizon; 2) finding out and solving their teaching blind spots; and 3) innovating their teaching, all of which lend strong support to the finding that knowledge sharing can positively impact on teachers’
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teaching efficacy and professional growth.
Some implications can be drawn from these two findings. First, to improve their teaching performance, English teachers should seriously consider to get involved in knowledge sharing in a more active and aggressive manner. As shown by the teachers’
experiences, knowledge is really something that the more it is shared, the more benefits it will bring to those who are involved.
Second, English teachers should be more aware of the importance of knowledge sharing and avail themselves to sharing knowledge, because doing so helps them gain more knowledge and know-how to increase their repertoire of teaching skills.
Third, English teachers must make good use of the Internet resources due to their convenience and other advantages illustrated previously. As technology advances rapidly and impacts greatly on modern people’s lives, being able to use the Internet technology can better English teachers’ teaching because they can not only garner lots of information through the Internet resources, but also get their problems solved through the instantaneous interaction with other teachers on the Internet.
Finally, as the participants reported, their schools do have set up information database for them to share what they know; however, this kind of platforms seems nearly “abandoned”. This kind of facility was established with good intention but ended up becoming a waste of both money and resources. For this reason, school authorities should take some measures to promote this kind of platforms and set relevant policies to encourage their teachers to make full use of them; in this way, the advantages of such information platforms can be attained.
This study has some limitations as well. First, in this small scale study only seven elementary school teachers were invited to be interviewed. Every participant has his or her unique experience, which makes it difficult to generalize the study’s outcomes to other teachers. Second, this study employed snowball sampling to recruit interview participants, and this has led to the fact that the participants come from only three districts of Pingtung County, which leaves unheard the voices of the teachers teaching in the other school districts of the county.
Based on the limitations above, suggestions are made for future studies. First, this study was conducted mainly via a qualitative mode, so studies employing quantitative methods might be welcome to compensate for the insufficiency of this study; for example, a large number of elementary school teachers would be involved in a survey in order to disclose more factors involved in their willingness to share knowledge. Second, in many elementary schools English is taught by contracted teachers instead of full-time teachers. These contracted teachers, though serving only temporarily in schools, also play an influential role in affecting students’ English learning. Thus, their knowledge sharing experiences are also worth exploring. Finally,
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the knowledge sharing experiences reported in this study might be different than that of junior or senior high school English teachers. To make the literature more complete, studies on English teachers at different levels should also be done.
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Appendix: The Interview Questions
1. 您對知識分享的看法為何?
2. 你覺得同事之間有知識分享的必要嗎?原因為何?
3. 您與同事在分享知識的時候，大部分都分享什麼內容?
4. 您覺得透過知識分享得到的知識，無論是在教學或個人成長方面，都有正面
影響嗎?影響為何?請舉例說明。
5. 您覺得目前有哪些動機會使您願意進行知識分享?
6. 您通常會透過哪些管道進行知識分享?
7. 您透過上述管道進行知識分享的原因有哪些?
8. 您通常在哪些場合或地點會與人分享知識?
9. 您覺得有哪些原因會阻礙您與人分享知識?
10. 還有其他因素會使您願意進行知識分享?