Language Awareness and Language Use: An Investigation of Chinese Secondary EFL Teachers

In the Chinese context, a new Curriculum Standard of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) for compulsory education was nationally enacted in 2017. Aiming at quality-oriented education, it laid a foundation to develop students’ comprehensive English language ability, including language skills, language knowledge, attitudes to learning, learning strategies, and cultural awareness. English language teachers in China are thus encouraged to draw on students’ experiences of learning their mother tongue and the needs of their cognitive development while teaching EFL. This study adopts a constructivist qualitative case study approach to investigate how EFL teachers in Chinese secondary schools used different languages (i.e. Chinese and English) to facilitate students’ comprehensive English competence. Specifically, this study used classroom observations of four classes and four semi-structured interviews to examine four Chinese secondary English language teachers’ language practices in the classroom. Using the translanguaging lens, this study aims to investigate Chinese EFL teachers’ language use from a speaker perspective and add more contextualised knowledge to studies of English teachers’ language use in secondary schools. It highlights the role of the teachers’ “first language” (L1) in teaching English as a “foreign language” (L2). Furthermore, this study provides suggestions regarding the teachers’ strategic use of students’ full linguistic repertoire for future EFL teaching.