Language, Culture and Curriculum

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Walking with bound feet: teachers’ lived

experiences in China’s English curriculum change

Wei Liu & Qiang Wang

To cite this article: Wei Liu & Qiang Wang (2020) Walking with bound feet: teachers’ lived
experiences in China’s English curriculum change, Language, Culture and Curriculum, 33:3,
242-257, DOI: 10.1080/07908318.2019.1615077

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2019.1615077

Published online: 07 May 2019.

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LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND CURRICULUM
2020, VOL. 33, NO. 3, 242–257
https://doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2019.1615077

Walking with bound feet: teachers’ lived experiences in

China’s English curriculum change
a
Wei Liu and Qiang Wangb
a
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada; bBeijing Normal University, Beijing, China

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Reported in this paper is an ethnographic study in a Beijing senior Received 5 December 2018
high school that aims to examine the pedagogical lived Accepted 29 April 2019
experiences of Chinese EFL teachers against the backdrop of the
KEYWORDS
nation’s mandated curriculum change. The lived experiences of China; curriculum change;
teachers gleaned from this study speak to the complexity and English teachers;
difficulty of pedagogical change at the classroom level. In ethnography; mutual
particular, the teachers’ classroom pedagogies are found to reflect adaption; teacher autonomy
neither the official curriculum ideas nor their own espoused
beliefs. The study points to the necessity of expanding space for
teachers’ autonomy to achieve more meaningful mutual adaption
in curriculum implementation.

There has been a large-scale curriculum change initiative in China across subject matters in
the new century. This study hopes to examine how well such a large-scale mandated
change has fared through the lens of Chinese teachers’ pedagogical lived experiences.

The curriculum change agenda in China

The traditional Chinese approach to education which emphasises teachers’ didactic knowl-
edge transmission and students’ respect for teachers’ authority in teaching has been
rather consistent over its long history (Huang, 2004). Classroom teaching has traditionally
emphasised students’ reception, repetition, review and reproduction of information trans-
mitted from teachers (Hu, 2002). Foreign language teaching has often prioritised the deliv-
ery of linguistic knowledge at the price of training students’ ability to meaningfully
communicate in the language (see Liu, 2016). Such pedagogical tradition has been con-
sidered ill fit for China’s economic and technological development today, and a curriculum
change is deemed necessary to allow China to survive and thrive in the world competition
of knowledge economy (Huang, 2004).
The economic development model adopted in China since the 1980s relies on cheap
labour and low-value added manufacturing, and is considered wasteful, polluting and
highly unsustainable. Around the turn of the century, an urgent need has been felt in
China to transform the economic development model toward one that is focused more
on technological innovation and higher-value production (Liu, 2016). With the goal of
achieving ‘quality-oriented education’ to produce creative talents for an innovation-driven

CONTACT Wei Liu weidavid@ualberta.ca

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND CURRICULUM 243

society, the current education reform initiative in China advocates a shift from the traditional
teacher-centered knowledge transmission to more active knowledge construction through
a learner-centered approach in teaching (Liu, 2011).
The new English curriculum standard (MoE, 2011) suggests that the goal of language
teaching is to develop students’ ‘language skills, language knowledge, affect and attitude,
learning strategies and cultural awareness’ (p. 4). The five components include not only the
language learning goals (language skills, language knowledge) but also general edu-
cational goals (affect and attitude, learning strategies, cultural awareness), and thus
reflect the humanistic principles of educating the whole person and developing life-
long learners (Liu, 2016). Pedagogically, teachers are supposed to ‘create close-to-life
language contexts, engage students in practical language activities, and adopt method-
ologies that stress both the process and outcome of teaching, such as the task-based
language teaching, so as to develop students’ ability to do things in English’. (MoE,
2011, p. 26). The new curriculum calls on teachers to break away from the structural
approach to language teaching with a focus on language forms and move toward a com-
municative approach that focuses on the meaning and communicative effectiveness, or
the ‘ability to do things in English’. As a whole, the new English curriculum in China can
be said to endorse a more communicative, constructive, heuristic and humanistic view
of language teaching (Liu, 2016).

How educational change happens

Educational change is always an imperative for the improvement of both educational
excellence and equity (Fullan & Stiegelbauer, 1991), but educational change is also
difficult, so much so that we are still at the early stage of understanding the nature and
complexity of education reform at a large scale (Fullan, 1999). Much literature on edu-
cational change seems to point to the fact that educational change is a complex multi-
dimensional process, which requires concerted efforts of all stake-holders. According to
Ball (1994), there are four interlinked ‘essential circuits’ of education reform, namely, cur-
riculum, assessment, pedagogy, and organisation. According to House and McQuillan
(2005), educational change is a complex enterprise that involves economic, political and
cultural changes all at the same time. According to Richardson and Placier (2001), many
reforms called for today, such as constructivist teaching and teaching for understanding,
require shifts in larger cultural understandings of teaching, learning and schooling.
China has a centrally coordinated education system, with the Ministry of Education in
Beijing managing the entire education system. There is one national curriculum document
for each subject matter throughout the country, allowing limited local variations. One
important way for China to initiate educational reform has been to change the national
curriculum document (and official textbooks), with the current curriculum reform being
the 8th of its kind since 1949. However, according to Fullan (2006), top-down stan-
dards-based system-wide reform initiatives with official standards, assessment, curriculum
and professional development are not enough to get close to what happens in classrooms.
There is always the tension between local particularities and universal desirables in the
processes of translation and re-contextualization (Ball, 1994), and if not dealt with properly,
it may result in the co-existence of the seemingly successful implementation at the surface
level and the complex behind-the-scene conflicts due to different attitudes, schemata and
244 W. LIU AND Q. WANG

interests at the deep structure level (Schriewer, 2012). Goodson (2001) believes that more
attention should be paid to personal missions and purposes which underpin commitment
to change processes under the postmodern condition.
In contrast to the traditional fidelity approach to curriculum implementation in which
teachers are supposed to faithfully implement the planned curriculum, research in the
1970s suggested that successful implementation of educational change is characterised
by a process of ‘mutual adaption’, in which the change agenda is modified to suit the
needs and interests of teachers, and teachers change their practices to meet the require-
ments of the change agenda (McLaughlin, 1976). In the 1990s, Snyder, Bolin, and Zumwalt
(1992) offered still another alternative implementation strategy, called curriculum ‘enact-
ment’, in which the curriculum is viewed as the educational experiences jointly con-
structed by students and teachers, using the planned curriculum document as a tool. A
more recent policy in China shifted partial power (about 10%) in curriculum decision-
making from the central government to local regions and individual schools, inviting tea-
chers to contribute to a partially school-based curriculum (see Xu, 2009). However, this
limited space of teacher autonomy allowed would not qualify the curriculum implemen-
tation in China as an enactment process.
Fullan (1994) points out that neither top-down nor bottom-up approaches work well,
but simultaneous centralized-decentralized forces should and can be combined for
more effective results in educational reform. Goodson (2001) also points out that there
should be a balance between internal-oriented changes (with professional groups
taking initiatives and control) and external-oriented changes (with change agendas exter-
nally generated and imposed from above). Thus the mutual adaptation perspective on cur-
riculum implementation seems to align organisational interests and teachers’ personal
interests (Richardson & Placier, 2001) in serving as a viable theoretical lens in the
Chinese context to examine the teachers’ pedagogical lived experiences against the back-
drop of government curriculum change initiatives.

Fieldwork in a Beijing school

Being emic by nature (Creswell, 2007), a qualitative research design to investigate tea-
chers’ pedagogical lived experiences as the ontological centre can give full recognition
to teaching as a complex social activity under the influence of a large number of social
and cultural forces. Pedagogical change in the classroom is a deep action phenomenon,
and researching a deep action phenomenon requires more ethnographic approaches to
information collection (Holliday, 1994). To glean the lived experiences of teachers in the
mandated curriculum change, an ethnographic study was conducted among English tea-
chers in a senior high school in Beijing (CZ school as its pseudonym), with the goal of
answering the following set of questions:

. How do teachers’ own philosophies of teaching relate to the mandated curriculum idea?
. How do teachers’ teaching practices relate to the mandated curriculum idea?
. What factors determine teachers’ level of adaptation of the mandated curriculum idea?

CZ is rated one of the top schools in Beijing in terms of graduates’ scores in the national
exams. CZ was also one of the first senior high schools in Beijing that participated in the
 LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND CURRICULUM 245

Table 1. The 10 teachers in this study.

Pseudonym Gender Years of teaching
1 Zhan M 15
2 Che F 1
3 Mah F 11
4 Yue F 13
5 Wan F 28
6 Lee (director) F 15
7 Bo F 5
8 Don F 16
9 Xue F 16
10 Wen F 5

piloting of the new national English curriculum and a new textbook series based on the
new English curriculum. There were altogether 15 English teachers at CZ who were
divided into three teams, each responsible for teaching students in one grade. Each
team is supposed to prepare their lessons together and maintain the same pace in their
teaching. In the tradition of ‘Teaching Research’, a major approach to teachers’ in-
service professional development in China (see Liu & Wang, 2018), all 15 teachers were
considered one ‘Teaching Research Group’, sharing a big common office space with
members of each team sitting closely together. They prepared their lessons in the office
and travelled to students’ dedicated classrooms to teach. Each class at CZ had about
30–35 students. The textbook series used were called Senior High English published by
a Chinese educational university, compiled in accordance with the new English curriculum
standard.
Altogether 10 CZ teachers voluntarily participated in this study, with 5 from the grade-
10 team, 4 from the grade-11 team, and 1 from the grade-12 team. Table 1 introduces the
10 teachers’ pseudonyms, gender and years of teaching experiences. Ms. Lee (highlighted)
was the Director of the whole office. As a PhD student, my access to CZ school was nego-
tiated through my supervisor’s personal connection with Ms Lee, who obtained her
Master’s Degree from the same university that housed my PhD program. She was the
gate keeper of this research project. I made weekly visits to the CZ office for a year.
Each time I visited, I would sit at one of two vacant cubicles and stayed at the school
for the whole day.
When used as a process of research, ethnography typically refers to fieldwork in which
the researcher is immersed in the day-to-day lives of the people and observes and inter-
views the group participants (Creswell, 2007). Interview and observation were used in this
study as the major methods of data collection. Upon my invitation, one formal guided
interview was conducted with each teacher at the beginning of the year, using more
open-ended interview questions to elicit teachers’ personal philosophies of good teach-
ing. The interview always began with the following questions:

. What qualities do you think a good senior high English teacher needs to have?
. What is a good English class in senior high like to you?

With freedom to decide what language to use, 8 teachers decided to interview in Chinese,
and 2 (Che and Mah) in English. Altogether there were about 8 h’ formal interview data
recorded and fully transcribed. Ethnographic research is an opportunistic adventure, as
246 W. LIU AND Q. WANG

qualitative data collection must stay in line with the unfolding nature of the field (Holliday,
2002). Apart from the formal guided interviews, multiple informal, conversational inter-
views were also conducted as opportunities arose. For example, after learning that Ms
Wan had taught at CZ for close to 30 years, I asked her to share with me her experiences
with past curriculum documents and textbooks; after knowing that Mr Zhan had been
involved as a marker of national exam English papers, I invited him to talk to me about
the historical changes in the tests and how they influenced their teaching. There was a
cafeteria at the school where lunch was provided for all teachers. The cafeteria became
a good venue for me to have many informal conversations with teachers.
Another important source of data was my naturalistic observations of what happened
in the CZ office space. Holliday (2007) believes that much can be learned from the descrip-
tion of what happens, that is, what is heard and what is seen, so far the description is
set alongside with other descriptions and other forms of data with an overall thick descrip-
tion. In the North American context, the teacher’s office is set within the classroom.
However, the common office space in China is a major site of teachers’ pedagogic lives
apart from the classroom. The atmosphere of the CZ common office space was very
warm and casual. Teachers often told jokes with each other and with me. It was very
easy for me to join their conversations. All 10 teachers welcomed me as a weekly visitor
to their office. They took interest in my research project and they were very happy to
talk with me about their teaching. Daily casual chats often turned into informal interviews
when we discussed topics that were related to my research agenda. During breaks or
lunch hours, many students also came to talk to their teachers individually about their
study in the office. At least one weekly entry was added to my ethnographic research jour-
nals based on what happened during the day I visited the school. Each entry includes
descriptive accounts of key observations or conversations I had, followed by my reflective
comments, recording what I thought about at the moment.
One very common ‘Teaching Research’ activity for teachers in China is called ‘demon-
stration class’ in which a teacher is invited to develop a new lesson and teach it to a class
that is open to the observation of peers (Elliott & Tsai, 2008). The ‘demonstration class’ is
always followed by a discussion session after students are dismissed, and sometimes with
a commentary from an invited researcher. For the above reason, I had easy access to CZ
teachers’ public demonstration classes during the year. To gain a true picture of teachers’
routine teaching behind classroom doors, I hoped to observe all my participants’ routine
classes for a sustained period of time. However, I found it extremely difficult to enter tea-
chers’ ‘real’ classes. The teachers’ responses to my polite request were often ‘Please don’t’,
‘My class is not worth observing’, and ‘You will make me very nervous’. I could understand
their feelings as I had similar experiences of being observed before. I felt I had to respect
their feelings and continue to develop rapport with them. For this reason, I only gained the
permission from Ms. Lee to observe 2 teachers’ (Che and Bo) routine classroom teaching
toward the end of my year and for 4 consecutive days only. Ms. Lee wanted to have the
least interruption to the teachers’ routine classroom teaching. This became a major limit-
ation of the study. I was arranged to observe Che and Bo’s routine teaching due to the
frequent interactions I had with them over the year and the rapport we developed.
Weekly visits to the school over a year and extensive interactions with the 10 teachers
contributed to data for a thick description of teachers’ beliefs, practices and daily concerns
in their natural teaching context. Data analysis was conducted simultaneously with data
 LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND CURRICULUM 247

Figure 1. The continuous sense-making process in thematic analysis.

collection in this study to avoid overwhelming data and to identify gaps in the collected
data (Merriam, 1998). van Manen (1990) points out that thematic analysis in qualitative
research is not an unambiguous and mechanical process of frequency counts or coding
of selected terms, but a process of insightful invention, discovery or disclosure. Informed
by such phenomenological hermeneutic approach to studying lived experiences, I
engaged in an ongoing process of making holistic sense of the gradually collected bits
and pieces of data through continuous reflection, writing and re-writing.
When a new data piece was collected, it was added to the previous data pool and the
previous meanings made were modified to incorporate the new data. For example, tea-
chers’ classroom teaching (both demo classes and routine classes) observed was com-
pared to the interview data to check the consistency of teachers’ beliefs and practices.
When they did not match, it was considered a salient incident, which needed to be
explored in follow-up interviews and made sense of by bringing in higher-order infor-
mation from the larger context of teachers’ lived experiences. Figure 1 shows the continu-
ous sense-making process in my thematic analysis. All the journal entries and my reflective
writings were pieced together in the final draft to weave a general picture of CZ teachers’
organic pedagogic lived experiences, organised around the three themes of teachers’ per-
sonal philosophy of teaching, their public discourses of teaching, and their private dis-
course of teaching. I shared the final draft of the whole thesis with all 10 teachers. Only
Mr. Zhan took time to read the whole draft. The feedback from him was that ‘It is a
very factual description’.

Balanced philosophies in language teaching

Based on the interview data, CZ teachers seem to embrace teaching philosophies that
balance the importance of language forms and meanings. All ten teachers believe that stu-
dents’ active, communicative and meaningful involvement in English is important, and this
248 W. LIU AND Q. WANG

is consistent with the official curriculum which suggests that teachers shift from linguistic
knowledge transmission to meaningful communication in their teaching. For example,
Che said,
I believe that we should throw students into the pool (of English) and make them learn certain
strokes and survive on their own. (Che, interview)

Che’s philosophy of language teaching reflects the inductive, learning by doing, and
immersive approach to teaching. In a similar vein, Mah said,
I just like to make my class more interesting, so I try to put some practical things into my class,
try to make them use the language to achieve something. That is what I do all the time. (Mah,
interview)

But at the same time, all ten CZ teachers believe that overt, deductive, form-focused
instruction is needed to accumulate and consolidate linguistic knowledge for students,
and this is in line with the more traditional way of language teaching in China. For
example, Wan said,
I feel grammar provides the basic framework for your communication. If you don’t have solid
grammar as the foundation, there is nowhere to build communication. If we get students to do
tons of talking and tons of writing, but they are all wrong, then what’s the point? (Wan,
interview)

Lee endorses Wan’s view,

Apart from engaging students in actively using (the language) and thinking in the language,
we feel we must make them master the necessary English knowledge in a sure and solid way.
(Lee, interview)

Beyond the methodological dimension, CZ teachers also believe that the humanistic and
emotional engagement with students is the key to the success of language teaching, for
example, Yue said,
If a teacher does not have emotional interaction with her class, and if she is not loved and
accepted by her students, and students don’t feel cared for by her, no matter how well she
has designed her class, it means nothing. If you engage your students emotionally, even
though your lesson design has flaws, you still have a wonderful class. (Yue, interview)

Wen mentioned the same point in her interview,

Your teaching needs the guidance of some methods. But if a teacher only mechanically
follows a certain procedure to teach, students would be bored and they won’t learn. At a
higher level, it is most important for teachers to love English, love students, love to commu-
nicate with students, and to be passionate about teaching so that you can motivate students
to learn. (Wen, interview)

Figure 2 is an attempt to visually capture CZ teachers’ philosophies of language teaching.

The fan space represents CZ teachers’ understanding of what good English teaching is.
Methodologically CZ teachers seem to embrace a balanced view between the meaning-
focused approach to engage students in the communicative and practical use of the
target language and the form-focused approach to overtly teach and consolidate stu-
dents’ linguistic knowledge (the two ends on the horizontal axis). This finding is congruent
with other studies on Chinese English teachers’ mixed beliefs in both the constructivist
 LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND CURRICULUM 249

Figure 2. CZ teachers’ personal philosophies of language teaching.

oriented pedagogies and traditional Chinese methodologies (see Zhang & Liu, 2014).
Beyond methodologies, CZ teachers also believe that teachers’ affective engagement
with students is a more important factor in determining success or failure in language
teaching (the vertical axis), and this should be a general aspect of all good teaching,
not specific to language teaching.

Meaning-focused pedagogy in the public domain

Altogether I had access to five open demonstration classes taught by four CZ teachers over
the year (Table 2 shows the 5 classes observed). As these demonstration classes were open to
all teachers, they constituted the public discourse of teachers’ pedagogy. Given the centrality
of textbooks in teachers’ teaching, the teachers’ teaching was always based on the materials
in the textbooks, typically a reading text. The textbook was organised in topic-based units.
The classroom activities observed all evolved around the central topic of a unit in the book.
The five demo classes all seemed to follow three stages: (1) Lead-in to the central
topic; (2) Reading or input stage; (3) Output stage. At the ‘Lead-in’ stage, the teachers
typically started their classes by engaging students in natural, meaningful conversations
in English about the topic. All five teachers used visual aids, such as video clips and pic-
tures, as meaningful contexts to situate the central topic in. There was no overt teach-
ing of vocabulary at the initial stage of the class; there was only minimal vocabulary
teaching in Che and Mah’s classes, but they were introduced together with pictures.
At the ‘reading/input’ stage, there were normally a series of interlocking tasks designed
on the basis of the reading passage in the book. In particular, the reading text was given
both a thematic treatment and a strategic treatment. By thematic treatment it meant the

Table 2. Information about demonstration classes observed at CZ.

Teachers Levels of organisation
1 Mah (1) CZ school
2 Che CZ school
3 Mah (2) District school board
4 Yue District school board
5 Don District school board
250 W. LIU AND Q. WANG

Table 3. The three stages of Mah’s demo class observed.

Stages Activities
The lead-in stage Video of different kinds of dances from around the world; ask students to group the different
dances in the video
The ‘reading / input’ Task 1: read to find key sentences and key words of each paragraph; Task 2: skim paragraphs 2
stage and 3 to fill in blanks about the ‘white bike plan’
The output stage Write a news report about ‘white bite plan’ in Amsterdam; give suggestions to make the ‘Beijing
bike rental plan’ work

discussion of the meaning of the text. In thematic treatment of the course materials, there
were both a global treatment and a detailed treatment. The global treatment engaged stu-
dents in fast reading to find the general meaning and structure of the whole reading text.
The detailed treatment engaged students in locating specific information from the text.
The strategic treatment of the text was intended to train reading strategies to students
so as to enhance their ability in reading. The reading strategies were often those that
could help students develop discourse skills that were supposed to equip students with
abilities to decode the reading text by holistically examining the cohesive and coherent
mechanisms of the text.
At the 3rd ‘output stage’, students were assigned tasks to produce the language. The
language production task was almost always a speaking task, unless it was a writing class.
The tasks assigned at this stage were thematically related to the reading/input stage activi-
ties, so there was thematic coherence across the three stages of teaching. However, there was
no language control in students’ production. The tasks at the output stage were also strongly
oriented toward students’ real lives. They were meant to give students opportunities to use
their language creatively in real or realistic situations. As an example, Table 3 shows the activi-
ties conducted in the three stages at Mah’s demo class. The topic of the text was ‘Amsterdam:
City of Bicycles’. At the output stage in particular, students were put into groups to develop
their proposed ‘plan’ and then were invited to share their ideas.
The fan shape in Figure 3 is a visual summary of CZ teachers’ demo class pedagogy. As a
whole, demonstration class teaching seems to be highly consistent with the inductive,
communicative, meaningful and student-centered philosophy of teaching carried in the
official curriculum, with next-to-none overt and direct treatment of language forms,
thus the fan shape is leaning toward the right side. The minimal amount of formal treat-
ment is conducted in inductive, meaningful ways. Teachers were all passionately engaged
with students in their teaching, and students were actively responsive, and thus the fan
shape is still all above the horizontal line.

Form-focused pedagogy in the private domain

As mentioned above, I obtained access to Che and Bo’s routine teaching in this study
toward the end of the year. There are many commonalities in the two teachers’ practices,
so given the limited space, I will present only Che’s routine teaching in a more detailed
manner. I followed one of her classes for four consecutive days from Monday to Thursday.
Friday of the week was a statuary holiday. Based on my conversations with CZ teachers and
my observation of Che and Bo’s teaching, each lesson in the textbook is dealt with in a
similar way, so each lesson is one cycle of teachers’ teaching in terms of the methodology
used, and can be used as one basic unit of analysis of their teaching practice.
 LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND CURRICULUM 251

Figure 3. CZ teachers’ demo class pedagogy.

Typically, each lesson is dealt with in 3 periods. The first period is called by teachers a
‘skill focus’ class, the second a ‘language focus’ class. The ‘skill focus’ class is more
meaning-based, while the ‘language focus’ class is devoted to the treatment of language
forms. There is also a following revision period which is also form-focused, involving stu-
dents in the treatment of exercises in the book or in other supplementary teaching
materials. So in a way, most of teachers’ meaning-oriented teaching is concentrated in
the first period of each lesson. Among the four consecutive periods that I observed,
only one period was a ‘skill focus’ class. The reading text for the period was titled Visiting
Britain. It was an English letter written by a Chinese student Xiaojin to his Aunt Mei who
was going to visit him in London. The letter introduced Britain and Xiaojin’s six months’
experience in there to prepare Aunt Mei for her visit. There were several aspects of the
British life introduced such as the food, the tipping practice in the restaurant, the country-
side, and the British humour.
Throughout the period, students were assigned to read the text twice. The first reading
was oriented towards the meaning of the text. After the first reading, there were tasks to
check both students’ grasp of the general meaning of the text (the prediction-checking
task and the paragraph-grouping task) and to check students’ grasp of the detailed infor-
mation (a T & F task). The second reading was oriented towards the forms of the text,
during which students’ attention was drawn to locating some important phrases whose
meanings were given in Chinese. The final activity was a language production task. As a
whole, the skill focus period was not totally devoted to the meaningful treatment of the
text. The limited time did not seem to allow teachers to conduct in-depth discussions
of the course contents. My journal entry records my overall impression right after my
observation of Che’s above class:
There seemed to be only a shallow dip into the meaning, and then the class switched to a
focus on form. For example, students made their predictions about information provided in
the text about Britain and then checked their predictions. While checking students’ predic-
tions, Che could have gotten students to talk more about the different aspects of information
about Britain, like, ‘What did the writer say about the food/ money in Britain?’ ‘What is the
252 W. LIU AND Q. WANG

weather like in Britain?’ Che could also ask students to have more open-ended discussions, like
‘Why do you think the Chinese people find it hard to understand British humor?’ ‘How do you
like the tipping practice in Britain? Do you think we should introduce that in China?’ However,
Che seemed to be pressured to rush through it so as to save time for other form-focused
activities. (Me, research journal)

In Che’s second period on the following day, she dealt with the formal aspects of the same
text, that is, the key words/ phrases and grammar items. She presented the phrases and
expressions in which some key verbs appeared in the text, but with these verbs taken
out. She invited her students to fill in the missing verbs:
____ you an apology
___________ culture shock
_____ your bill
___________ traveler’s cheques
[…]

After students filled in the verbs, Miss Chen explained the usages of these verbs, with
mixed use of Chinese and English. After explaining the usage of these verbs, she
engaged students in a blank-filling exercise as an opportunity for them to use these verbs:
afford, experience, owe, exchange
• I ______ my brother $50.
• We can’t ______ to go on vacation this year.
• At the end of the game players traditionally _________ shirts with each other.
[…]

After dealing with the key vocabulary of the text, Che began to deal with the major
grammar items of the lesson: verbs followed by –ing form and verbs followed by infinitive.
Che first guided students in doing an exercise provided in the textbook:
Look at the blue verbs in the text and classify the verbs below into the correct columns.
Expect, risk, refuse, avoid, advise, suggest, need, enjoy, consider, afford

Verbs + infinitive Verbs + -ing form

expect, refuse, advise, need, afford risk, avoid, suggest, enjoy, consider

After doing this exercise from the textbook, Che showed students six multiple-choice
questions from previous Gaokao (university entrance exam) test papers in different pro-
vinces in different years. All the six questions were testing students’ knowledge of the
central grammar focus of the lesson: verbs followed by infinitive and verbs followed by
–ing form.
1) — There is a story here in the paper about a 110-year-old man.
— My goodness! I can’t imagine ______ that old. (2006 Jiangsu province)
A. to be B. to have been C. being D. having been
2) Susan wanted to be independent of her parents. She tried _____ alone, but she didn’t like it
and moved back home. (2008 Huan Province)
A. living B. to live C. to be living D. having lived
3) The parents suggested ________ in the hotel room but their kids were anxious to camp out
during the trip. (2006 Shanghai)
A. sleep B. to sleep C. sleeping D. having slept
[…]
 LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND CURRICULUM 253

Figure 4. Teachers’ routine class pedagogy.

Figure 4 is a visual representation of CZ teachers’ routine class pedagogy, with the fan
shape slanted toward the form-focused deductive left and away from the communicative
inductive right. In terms of teacher-student affective interaction and engagement, there is
no difference between the open discourse and the routine discourse observed, so that fan
shape is still above the horizontal axis.

Discussion
With mutual adaption as a theoretical lens for curriculum implementation, CZ teachers’
routine teaching practices can be said to be the result of a mutual adaptation process,
but what compromised scenario between desired change agenda and teachers’ practice
would allow us to say that the change project is a success? If we perceive the change
agenda and the teachers’ current practices as the two ends of a continuum at the begin-
ning of the innovation initiative, how far does teachers’ practice have to move toward the
desired change in the mutual adaption process when we can pronounce the initiative a
success in bringing meaningful change, and not just superficial change? If CZ teachers’
change in their routine teaching is not considered significant enough, what have
stopped them from teaching more in line with their demonstration class practice
(which is close to 100% implementation), or even in line with their own beliefs (which is
about 50–50 mutual adaption)? The current literature on mutual adaptation does not
seem to have answers for these questions.
It would be all too easy to put the blame on teachers. One may be inclined to bash tea-
chers as double-faced hypocrites who comply with the mandated innovations in public
settings, but are unwilling to change as much behind classroom doors. Such accusation
would reflect a simplistic view on issues related to pedagogical change. The following
entry in the research journal records a snap-shot of CZ teachers’ office conversation:
In the office, Don was thinking about what writing assignment she should assign to students
in the following Chinese Tomb-Sweeping Day holiday. She was wondering if she could assign
a writing assignment related to this festival. Sitting beside Don, I suggested that it would be a
good idea to ask students to write about the Chinese government’s move to make the Tomb-
Sweeping Day a national holiday with one day off. Celebrating traditional Chinese festivals as
national holidays was a recent policy adopted by the Chinese government to conserve
254 W. LIU AND Q. WANG

Chinese cultural heritages. Don said that it might be a good topic, especially after South Korea
claimed the Chinese Mooncake Festival as a Korean holiday by a successful bid for the World
Cultural Heritage. However, Ms. Lee said that such sensitive topics would never be tested at
Gaokao. Tested at Gaokao were normally narrative types of writing. She suggested that
Don assign the writing tasks of the 2008 or 2009 Gaokao test papers. One was a picture
description task about students planting trees, and the other was a similar picture description
task concerning collecting garbage to keep the environment clean. Don finally decided to take
Lee’s suggestion though she signed and said they were boring. (Me, office observation)

This snapshot of the office discourse helps answer the third research question we raised:
What factors determine teachers’ level of adaption of the mandated curriculum idea? Tea-
chers have to respond to multiple and simultaneous pressures and demands that are sys-
temic and chronic in nature (McLaughlin, 1990). Teachers in this study are torn between
two accountability requirements that pull them toward different directions. First, they
are accountable to implement a communitive oriented curriculum that aims to improve
students’ communicative competence in English. At the same time, they are accountable
to help students prepare for and succeed in a linguistic oriented evaluation. In between
the two, the teachers’ own pedagogical beliefs and philosophies seem to be irrelevant
and totally out of the picture. After all, teachers’ work evaluation depends on students’
exam results, as the following conversation with Wan shows:
[…] We used to announce students’ scores and places in class publicly, making them known to
everyone. These days, we prepare a small slip of paper for each student with his or her scores
and place on it. So only students themselves know their scores and their places in the class.
This is to protect students’ feelings and is a big improvement on the past practice. However,
teachers’ scores of their classes are made public among all the teachers. In a staff meeting after
each major exam, the average score of each class on any subject is shown on the screen. So if
you see that the class you teach has the lowest score on the subject you teach, you will natu-
rally shift the pressure onto your students. Ultimately, it is still only the score that is used to
evaluate the students, the teachers and the school. […] So fundamentally, nothing has
changed. (Wan, interview)

Assumed in the concept of ‘mutual adaptation’ (McLaughlin, 1976) is teachers’ freedom in

pedagogical decision-making to seek best ways to implement a proposed curriculum idea
that make local sense. In other words, a meaningful adaptive implementation of the official
curriculum requires much autonomy awarded to teachers in the classroom. Unfortunately
such requisite space of autonomy is seriously compromised and cut into by the high-stake
exams. There existed in Chinese history the custom of applying tight binding to the feet of
young women. It was a mark of status and beauty imposed upon women in a male chau-
vinist world, and it set a huge limitation on the mobility and freedom of women in society.
The dilemmas faced by teachers in this study are reminiscent of the situation of the
Chinese women in history with bound feet. They are supposed to run, and they are
able to run (as shown in their demonstration classes), but can only walk, rather slowly,
due to the binding on their feet. Smyth and Shacklock (1998) criticised the discourse of
decentralisation of curriculum making and teacher partnership as ‘pseudo-participation
and quasi-democracy’ (p. 23). They believe that teachers’ authoritative voice in educational
change is often not located in curriculum theorising and policy making, but within the
local context of curriculum reform implementation, derived from their intimate knowledge
of their students, resources and practicalities. However, based on the findings of this study,
 LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND CURRICULUM 255

even at the stage of implementation, teachers do not exert the freedom of teaching in
accordance to their beliefs, nor the mandated curriculum ideas.
The curriculum change at the policy level is justified, given the perceived drawbacks of
the traditional pedagogical approach in student development and country development.
But many other changes need to take place before the curriculum ideas filter into the
classroom and really benefit the students. Given the huge washback effect of Gaokao
on teachers’ teaching, a listening portion was added to the Gaokao English test in 2001
to make it more communicative than the previous written-only test, unavoidably
focused on linguistic skills. The next desirable change would be to include a speaking
portion, but it would be challenging to administer nation-wide in a fair and equitable
manner. After all, we are talking about close to 10 million examinees each year. In the
recent change to Gaokao starting in 2017, the weight of the English test in university
admission was reduced in comparison with other subjects, and students are allowed to
take the English test multiple times a year and submit the highest score in university appli-
cation. Theoretically, Gaokao in English is socialised and externalised more like a language
proficiency test. Such changes intend to reduce the stake associated with the English
exam. However, Gaokao’s selection function for university admission is intact. The compe-
titiveness of university admission, in a populous country, is a result of the high demand
and low supply for higher education opportunities. More university spots in better
quality, and evenly distributed among higher education institutions, require more invest-
ment from the government. Before all these changes take place, Gaogao will continue to
stay as the most fundamental safeguard for social equality and justice in education, and
teachers will have to continue to prepare students for it in teaching.
Implementing the above chain of systemic changes to achieve some positive washback
in the classroom pedagogy seems like wishful thinking, but real meaningful educational
change is as hard as that. There need to be systemic changes in the whole educational
ecology to remove some of the shackles on teachers’ feet so that they can fully
embrace the new pedagogical ideas in their day-to-day teaching. Such deep changes
would necessarily be a gradual and longitudinal process, not a quick fix. The longitudinal
aspect of educational change is shaped by the convergence of large-scale economic and
demographic shifts in a country (Hargreaves & Goodson, 2006). Economic and demo-
graphic shifts of a country would take, not years, but decades to take place. Deep
changes in the cultural paradigms of education would take, not decades, but centuries
to happen. According to a Chinese saying known to all Chinese people, ‘It takes a
decade to grow a forest; it takes a century to cultivate a population’.
In the current situation, teachers need to exercise Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire,
1970) and reflect on their own pedagogical predicament to raise their awareness of the
oppressive structures they live in, the limited space of autonomy they have, and their
inability to achieve meaningful mutual adaption. The lip service of giving teachers auton-
omy in pedagogical decision-making only as a rhetorical discourse on paper, while the
pressure of securing students’ success in high-stake exams continues to exist, would
not result in much positive change in the classroom. For this reason, caution needs to
be exercised when we talk about teacher agency and autonomy. Giving teachers
limited autonomy in educational change does not warrant the total transfer of 100% liab-
ility to teachers for failure of change. In other words, the system should not bash teachers
256 W. LIU AND Q. WANG

for failure of change while the heavy neoliberal binding in the form of performativity and
accountability in a highly competitive policy environment is not taken off from their feet.
Teacher leadership in driving curriculum change is much needed and should be pro-
moted as part of a new culture of change in China to counterbalance the more traditional
top-down approach. To combine McLaughlin’s (1976) idea of ‘mutual adaptation’ and
Snyder et al.’s (1992) idea of ‘enactment’, the most meaningful mutual adaptation
should be ‘enacted adaption’, where teachers assume more genuine leadership roles
with expanded autonomy and authority to make sense of the curriculum ideas and to
work creatively with them in the specific classroom setting in partnership with students.
The ideal ‘enacted adaption’ approach to curriculum implementation would realign the
relationship between the curriculum, the students, the evaluation and the teacher. The
teacher and the students are no longer dominated by and torn between the curriculum
and the evaluation. Instead, they become the centre in interpreting, adapting and benefit-
ing from the planned curriculum as a facilitative tool, and evaluation works only as a feed-
back mechanism to inform the teacher and students how well they have been doing.

Conclusion
The study, set in the Chinese context, speaks to the complexity and challenges of large-
scale state-mandated pedagogical change at the classroom level. Fullan and Stiegelbauer
(1991) believe that holding schools accountable alone is not an effective strategy for
change. As this study serves to show, holding teachers accountable alone for change is
not going to work either. Teachers should not be bashed for their unwillingness for
change while their feet are bound from change. The uptake of new curriculum ideas by
teachers would require more structural changes to the whole educational ecology in
which teachers have to live and survive. In the meantime, the space for teacher agency
and teacher leadership in driving ground-up changes need to be broadened to achieve
more meaningful and more significant enacted adaptive change in teaching.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID
Wei Liu http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8676-6776

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