ABSTRACTCHINESE LANGUAGE TEACHERS' SOCIALIZATION INTO THE PROFESSION: A COMPARATIVE STUDYbyWenxia Wang This comparative case study investigated how new Chinese language teachers from different linguistic and cultural/ethnic backgrounds (from the U.S., the People's Republic of China, and Taiwan) are socialized to teach Chinese as a foreign language in U.S. public K-12 schools, by focusing on four Chinese language teachers in a Chinese Teacher Certification Program at a Midwestern university in the United States. This study adopted the interactive perspective of teacher socialization proposed by Zeichner and Gore (1990) for educational research, in order to investigate the four focal teachers' socialization and how they also had some impact on the teaching environments they were in. This research study was designed to be a qualitative case study. A variety of data was collected, including the focal teachers' journals and teaching videos; documents from the local schools and the certification program, and their field instructor's written feedback. Interviews were conducted with the focal teachers and the persons who were involved in the teachers' first year of teaching. Data was collected from September, 2009, to June, 2010, altogether for one academic year. Data analysis for this study was cyclical and was guided by my extensive preparation in qualitative research in education and Second Language Acquisition (SLA). This study found that the four teachers' knowledge of teaching was developed in both similar and different ways because of their different linguistic, cultural, social, and ethnic backgrounds, and the teacher knowledge that they needed to gain and develop was much more complicated than "pedagogical content knowledge" (Shulman, 1986). Their learning from the teacher education program and their schools and their own understandings interacted with each other and jointly shaped the teachers' knowledge of teaching and socialization. The findings of this study have implications for the fields of language teacher education and mainstream education in several aspects. First, this study revealed that Chinese language teachers' many years of apprenticeship did not affect their teaching as substantially as described in the literature on mainstream teacher education. Their original linguistic and cultural backgrounds played more important roles in their teaching than their second/foreign language learning experiences. Both native and non-native teachers, and experienced and complete novice language teachers, can be effective, and they develop in different ways. Second, this study found that teacher education courses were able to have considerable impact on the teachers' teaching only when the courses addressed teachers' needs and were connected to their teaching. However, their internship and their first year of teaching simultaneously can be both positive and negative to teachers' development. Similar implications are also applicable to the field of language teacher education. Lastly, this study also showed that various factors and forces (students, mentor teachers, colleagues, parents, contexts, etc.) in schools influence teachers' development and jointly shape teachers' socialization. However, the participating teachers were also actively involved, and they counter-influenced their contexts and the profession. During these processes, the influence of cultural differences was complicated. Meanwhile, whether contexts for SLA theories and those for teachers' teaching are consistent might influence whether teachers can move from theory to practice. This study also found an urgent need for Chinese teacher education programs to develop better program courses and more teaching materials.
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