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What’s the Question? How Pre-service Chinese M.Ed.s in TESOL Learn to
Lead Discussions through Dialogue
By Keenan Fagan, Vanderbilt University
Abstract: Employing qualitative participant research methods in grounded naturalistic inquiry,
this paper investigates the ability of ten Chinese M.Ed.s in TESOL to create questions on course
readings to lead class discussions in their first semester at a highly ranked American college of
education. A workshop for academic support provided opportunities to rehearse required
Discussion Leader presentations and receive feedback from classmates and the teacher. Through
dialogue, students learned criteria for good questions and ways to create and implement them.
This learning has implications for their disposition toward communicative language teaching.
Introduction:
The importance of asking good questions for dialogue and learning is not foreign to the
Chinese. Zhu Xi’s oft repeated idiom 勤学好问 (Qin xue hao wen), True study requires good
questions, has motivated Chinese students for eight centuries (Cheng, 2000, p. 440). The Chinese
word for knowledge is a compound of the characters “xue (to learn) and…wen (to ask)” (ibid, p.
440). In Buddhism, the best path to enlightenment is meditation on a koan, or a question
(SongChol, 2004). And the importance of face-to-face communication for learning is apparent
throughout Confucius’ Analects, which are wholly comprised of dialogues and sayings in
conversation. The grand master emphasized how dialogue is a two-way street in his old maxim,
“The teacher does not always have to be more knowledgeable than the pupil; and the pupil is not
necessarily always less learned than the teacher” (Cheng, 2000, p. 440).
But have these time-honored communicative practices of wisdom passed down to
China’s tens of thousands of university students in English teacher training? This study of ten
Chinese M.Ed. TESOL (Teaching English to Students of Other Languages) students that I taught
at highly ranked Bendbow College in the southeastern U.S. seeks to answer this question. It
investigates student ability to create questions on course readings to lead discussions. Through
dialogic rehearsals of Discussion Leader presentations in a workshop for academic support, it
examines how these students learn to create better questions to lead assigned class discussions.
Background Literature & Theory:
Teacher ability to construct questions that facilitate communication in classes is
important in that communicative language teaching (CLT) has long been regarded as the
professional approach of TESOL (Larsen-Freeman, 2000; Brown, 2001). This approach relies on
students and teachers asking questions. China’s Ministry of Education has mandated it since
1985 (Qi, 2005). Chinese parents and students want English to be spoken in English classes (Rao,
2002; Lee, I., 2004; Littlewood & Liu, 1996; Pan & Block, 2011). And increasingly affluent
Chinese students want to communicate in English on the global stage (Pan & Block, 2011).
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But in spite of these recent developments, and time-honored reverence for dialogical
questioning, many scholars argue that a Confucian culture of education makes China unreceptive
to the communicative language teaching (CLT) of English (Hu, 2002, 2005; Cortazzi & Jin,
1998, 1996; Tang & Absalom, 1998; Rao, 2002; Pan & Block, 2011; Wen & Clement, 2003).
Through a Confucian model, Hu (2002) tells us, education has been conceived as the
accumulation of knowledge rather than its construction through questioning and its practical
application. “True knowledge has been popularly held to reside in written texts, especially
classics and authoritative works” (Hu, 2002, p. 97). Referring to textbooks is more important
than the CLT practice of negotiating meaning between classmates. The essentiality of
harmonious hierarchical relationships in the Confucian model limits dialogical questioning
because it means listening to, respecting, and being agreeable with teachers (Hu, 2002). The
teacher has a reciprocal moral responsibility to be a model of learning who holds knowledge and
passes it down to students (Hu, 2002). This cultural conception of teacher responsibilities has
passed mouth to ear for centuries in the old proverb, “To give students a bowl of water, the
teacher must have a bucket of water to dispense” (Hu, 2002, p. 98). Classes are saturated with
teacher-talk (My Chinese Students, personal communications, 2012-2014). The teacher must be
“a virtuoso of learning” (Cortazzi & Jin, 1996) who “has all the correct answers at all times” (Hu,
2002, p. 99), and constantly exerts complete directive control over the class (Tang & Absalom,
1998). For these reasons, Chinese teachers “strive to avoid” the unpredictability of constructivist
CLT pedagogy (Hu, 2002, p. 98). Through CLT student-generated language and questions, the
teacher might not have the answer. It is important for Chinese teachers to control a lesson so they
do not lose face in holding culturally revered positions. Reverence for teachers is culturally
regulated in the idiom, “‘Being a teacher for only one day entitles one to lifelong respect from
the student that befits his father’” (Hu, 2002, p. 98). Even more advanced English classes to
improve student teacher content knowledge (Shulman, 1987) in Chinese university TESOL
programs are controlled through traditional and teacher-centered practices (Hu, 2005). For these
classes, lecturers plan and deliver meticulous explanations of minor grammar points down to the
last detail (Hu, 2005; Cortazzi & Jin, 1996)).
These traditional teacher-centered practices perpetuate the lasting effects of the
apprenticeship of observation (Lortie, 1975; Grossman, 1991, Borg, 2004), whereby teachers
teach just as they were taught as students. In habitual observation, students adopt normative
scripts of how teaching should look and then be practiced (Gutierrez, 2007; Bourdieu, 1991).
Through the lens of an activity system, Cole and Engestrom (1993) tell us that when practices
are institutionalized in schools they are very resistant to change.
Once…[activities] gain the status of cultural practices, they often have radically
longer half-lives than an individual goal-directed action. In fact, activity systems
such as those that take place in schools and doctors’ offices for example appear
to reproduce similar actions and outcomes over and over again in a seemingly
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monotonous and repetitive manner that gives cultural constraints on action a
seemingly overpowering quality. (Cole & Engestrom, 1993, p. 8).
But in examining how Chinese English teachers develop, we know that there is no
factory enclosed by great walls. Rather, teacher learning is “built on a history of relationships
and influences, both local and distal….Students’ environments and practices are also the
consequence of globalization, transmigration, and the intercultural experiences of their everyday
lives” (Gutierrez, 2007, p. 116). To thus see the big picture of student learning, Engestrom (2005)
and Gutierrez (2007) agree that it must be examined across at least two activity systems. As my
students compare their old Chinese and newer American activity systems of education, this study
will also use two activity systems to map the comparative differences they notice at Bendbow
College (see Figure 1). It will use the model of two activity systems to “focus analysis on what
takes hold as youth move within and across tasks, contexts, and spatial, linguistic, and
sociocultural borders” (Gutierrez, 2007, p. 116).
Chinese Activity System of English Education
U.S. Activity Systems of English Education
Figure 1. Model for Charting Movement across Chinese and U.S. Activity Systems of English
Education. Considering the effects of globalization, these two systems lie within a world culture
of educational activity and exchange (Baker & LeTendre, 2005; Gutierrez, 2007; Tsui, 2005).
Participants, Setting, & Questions of this Study:
In the fall of 2013, the ten Chinese students in this study came to highly ranked Bendbow
College with affluence, higher levels of schooling in China, developed Chinese literacy, strong
abilities at recitation, high TOEFL and GRE scores, some overseas experiences, and great
expectations. These new M.Ed. in TESOL students were in their early twenties, with the
exception of Dilin in his mid-twenties. This was their first opportunity for study with American
classmates. About half of the students in their two fall semester classes (Foundations of ELL
Education and Linguistics/Second Language Acquisition in the Classroom) were American
undergraduates studying for education degrees at the elementary or secondary levels. The
curricula for these classes did not have an international focus. They were designed for teaching
English Language Learners in American schools, though there was only one American student
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remaining in the domestic ELL teaching strand. However, one study for Foundations of ELL
Education was on bilingual education in minority regions of China, particularly Tibet (Wang &
Phillion, 2009). And in case studies of individual leaners for the SLA class, the English
acquisition of East Asian subjects could be investigated. These ten Chinese M.Ed.s studied with
me in a writers’ workshop that fall, and are the primary participants of this study.
In 2011 I began assisting the larger numbers of Chinese entering the TESOL program
with academic work and cultural adjustment in a writers’ workshop. I was offered this position
for my PhD stipend because I had taught ESL in South Korea for 16 years and was familiar with
East Asians and East Asian culture. During the summer of 2012, I supplemented this experience
by teaching 108 class hours at Shandong University in Jinan, China. I began researching the
learning and development of my workshop students in the fall of 2012.
The two primary duties of the workshop were to assist students in a process writing
approach and to help them rehearse leading discussions on studies for the Foundations class.
Discussion Leader presentations were an important part of Chinese student learning as it was one
of their first major experiences trying to practice a dialogical form of communicative language
teaching. They reported little student experience receiving such communicative instruction or
attempting to practice it. And this was certainly one of the first times, if not the very first, that
they would actually teach American students. The assignment was also 9 % of their grade. This
paper focuses on their dialogue in the workshop to create questions for Discussion Leader
presentations. It asks three questions.
1. What kind of questions did they create for rehearsals and presentations?
2. How did the workshop discuss the efficacy of these questions?
3. What question changes and learning took place through this dialogical work?
Data & Method:
To answer these questions I analyzed video and audio recordings of every Discussion
Leader workshop rehearsal except for the one unrecorded on 10/15/13. By 10/16/13, I did,
however, have American student consent to audiotape the Foundations discussion led by Shuang
and Chaoxing. I also recorded and analyzed the three class discussions that followed this. For
those five discussions coming before 10/16/13, I took pages of fieldnotes in class observation.
With these sources, I triangulated data from PowerPoints, emails, interviews, supervisory
practicum observations, and recordings of practicum post-lesson feedback sessions.
My method of analysis followed principles of participant, naturalistic inquiry in
qualitative grounded theory practice (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Strauss & Corbin, 1990; Charmaz,
2006), by being open to emerging findings in an ongoing investigation conducted over several
months as insights, findings, and new directions opened in ongoing analysis. Through what I call
idea by idea coding – chunking by ideas and not static units like lines - three levels of initial
rehearsal questions with particular qualities and characteristics emerged from analysis. The
ability to pinpoint the time of rehearsals and presentations allowed for the investigation of
sequential learning progression amongst the ten students in the workshop.
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Findings:
I found that the initial ability of students to generate discussion questions fell into three
levels (see Table 1). This paper will report on a representative student at each of these levels.
Dilin (rehearsing on 9/2,3/2013) represents students whose traditional conceptions of
presentation and teaching prevent the awareness that questions are needed for discussion
leadership. Qin (9/16,17/13) represents students whose questions generate obvious or obscure
answers, are unlikely to spur discussion, and are not related to the import of the study. And
Shuang and Chaoxing (10/14,15/13) represent students cognizant that meaningful questions from
the reading will drive the discussion. They understand that dialogue with classmates in the
workshop can help them develop good questions.
Table 1:
Quality and characteristics of discussion questions in first rehearsals
Question
Types:
No
questions
Names:
Level
Dilin
9/2/13
Qin
9/16/13
Huifang
9/30/13
Feng
10/7/13
Shuang &
Chaoxing
10/14/13
Changying
10/21/13
Lei
10/28/13
Yifei &
Liqiu
11/4/13
1
A
request;
not a
question
The
answers
are
already
given
Question
is not
related to
the study
2
General
TESOL
Question
Related,
Students
students
lack
have info.
information
Good
to answer
discussion
questions
questions .
3
      
   
     
      
      
     
     
      
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Dilin’s Rehearsals on 9/2,3/2013 and his Foundations class Discussion on 9/4/13
On our first day of the writers’ workshop, 8/26/13, I gave the students a true/false quiz to
discuss in pairs. The fifteen statements were about the work that they would be doing at
Bendbow College. The first statement on it was, When I am a discussion leader, it is more
important to give the other students good questions for exploring the topic of my reading than it
is to talk about it at length. This was an obviously true, unproblematic statement for all of the
pairs, so we did not need to discuss it as a whole class. They also generally agreed with question
4: Unlike classes in Chinese Universities, my classes here will consist of a lot of group work and
discussion.
However, in rehearsing his Discussion Leader presentation on September 2nd, Dilin did
not include any questions in his presentation. The omission was exacerbated in that his study by
Townsend and Fu (1998) was about how American teachers gave a newly arrived Chinese 8 year
old named Xiaodi ample opportunities to freely express himself in class through various literacy
activities. In these activities, Xiaodi could also use his first language. Soon he gained the courage
to present his own literacy creations to the class through English speech. Dilin lectured about
how this “Chinese boy’s joyful initiation into American literacy” (Fu & Townsend, 1998, study
title) differed from Chinese practices.
Like he used the language just, not like what we have learned when we were,
uh, in [China]. In China we learn English because we want to take a test,
want to get a job, but here the child is involved in this native...in [this] all
English environment. He can talk to them. He can use the language for, like,
to study, to keep up with his classmates, to talk with them.
In spite of voicing this critical comparative understanding, his rehearsal showed that he
could not yet practice dialogical teaching that allowed students to use language. He was
recapitulating the normative practices of his apprenticeship of observation (Lortie, 1975;
Grossman, 1991; Borg, 2004) in the teacher-centered English classes he experienced as a student
(Dilin, personal communications, 2013-2014). He reported perpetuating these same teachercentered practices during three years of English lecturing from PowerPoints at a technical
college in Shanghai.
After he had run the workshop through his entire rehearsal slide by slide, I cued Dilin and
the class to recall the communicative requirements of the assignment.
1:54.05 – 1:54:22
Keenan: What’s the name of the assignment? What’s the name of this
assignment that all of you are going to be doing?
Chorus of Students: Discussion leader. Dilin: …leader.
Keenan: Have you done any discussion yet? Shuang: No.
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Dilin: I put the question and analysis one.
1:54:23 – 1:54:43
Keenan: How long do you think it will take you to go from the beginning,
to the discussion?
Shuang: Umm, yeah. Changying: That’s my point, too.
Keenan: How long will that take?
Changying: You should be precise. Chaoxing: Yeah, yeah.
Qin: Uh huh.
Changying: You should be precise.
Dilin: Precise? That’s not precise?
Feng: I think you should… Changying: Shorten what You Wanna Say
and Lead to the Discussion!
Yifei: You explain too much.
Derek: Explain too much…
Yifei: Explain too much.
1:54:44 – 1:55:05
Feng: Yeah, because all of us will have read this article, so you don’t have
to…
Yifei: Keep the point: the important point[s].
Feng: …Yeah, don’t spend so much time explaining this.
Changying: Or you can put your thoughts in the discussion you are going
to lead, like organizing an activity that is similar to the way the research has
[been] conducted.
Until this class review of his presentation, Dilin was oblivious to the incongruence
between his planned presentation and the dialogical teaching practices required by the
Discussion Leader assignment. He finds it difficult to believe that he has not been “precise” and
“explain[s] too much” in merely executing normative Chinese practices of teaching. He has
missed the import of messages in his new classes and readings that advocate communicative
teaching practice.
Some ten hours later that evening, Dilin sent a revised PowerPoint that included these
questions for group discussion:


Suppose you are the ELL teachers who will be teaching the kids with
different language background, what kind of role do you play in the
ELL’s initiation into new literacy?
What creative and interest teaching methods can you think of to
facilitate ELL children’s engagement with the new literacy?
Including questions showed essential learning from our dialogue at the end of class
earlier that day. But Dilin is still not able to take up Changying’s suggestion to “put your
thoughts in the discussion you are going to lead, like organizing an activity that is similar to the
way the research has [been] conducted.” His questions are not very related to the research of Fu
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and Townsend (1998), but are general and broad questions for TESOL. They are characteristic of
the questions that Qin would present to us in her first rehearsal two weeks later.
The following day the workshop engages in a discussion of the Fu and Townsend study
and then Dilin runs us through a second rehearsal. Afterwards, the class engages in a long
discussion to help him make better questions. Their suggested questions, however, seem like
they will still not produce a good class discussion. So finally, I suggest that Dilin introduce
Xiaodi as he entered the American classroom with almost no English literacy skills. Then he can
merely ask groups to discuss how they as teachers would help this boy develop second language
literacy skills. Before the discussion begins he can tell groups that the class will later compare
their plans to the authors’ findings. After the discussion, he can report how the authors found that
Xiaodi’s teachers helped him joyfully develop literacy skills through a process writing approach
rather than an explicit approach. Though Dilin has an MA from prestigious Shanghai
International Studies University in teaching English, the terms process approach and explicit
approach are new to him and cause a great deal of confusion. I advise him to avoid these in
introducing his question for discussion.
In his presentation to the Foundations class the following day, I see that he has taken
some of my suggestions. After showing a brief video clip of teachers talking about the challenges
of teaching young ELL students, he begins introducing Xiaodi to the class to prepare them to
discuss how they would teach this boy. But with his self-proclaimed “broken English,” Dilin has
difficulty with this introduction. The professor is unaware of Dilin’s attempts and says, “Tell us
about Xiaodi.” Fortunately, Dilin is then able to provide a more comprehensible and succinct
introduction. Afterwards, he asks his classmates to discuss how they would teach Xiaodi English
literacy skills. However, Dilin has not taken my advice to avoid asking them to consider using
either a process or explicit approach in their planned teaching. Immediately an American student,
and then the class, ask him what these approaches mean. Dilin is able to refer to his handout
where he has given definitions of these approaches. I observe that the groups are able to work
with these definitions to determine which approaches they would employ.
Though Dilin looked very jumpy to this point, when he sees that the students have taken
up his questions in discussion, he looks amazed. Then a smile beams from his face as he bounces
from table to table in the engaged ten minute group discussions that ensue. In an interview
recorded immediately following this class, Dilin described the experience. He began by focusing
on his shortcomings.
This is my first time to give, like, American students the presentation in
English. It is a daunting task. Sometimes I just find my language is still
lacking some effective communicative skills…so I find that when I is trying
to explain them, I made a lot of mistakes…I can’t repeat the right word, and
I become too nervous, and I repeat too much.
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I give a few understanding responses with “ohs,” but then say, “So you said it was
daunting, but there were a lot of good things that you did; how about some good things that you
did?” Dilin’s tone brightened as he began,
The good thing is that with the help of you and my classmates, I kind of, you
know, put this PP into pieces and make it like more creative, make it more
like, we are discussing…I am not giving the speech here. We are discussing
here. So like students here, we are all participating in this discussion very
actively. And they also give me the feedback, and they are kind of taking it
very seriously, which make me feel happy because it seems that my efforts
are paid off with their attention and their participation…I liked the way that
we did this presentation in a, more like discussion way, instead of like, most
of the lectures…in China. Or a lot of American professors come to my
school university…they give a lecture, but it’s more like they are doing the
talking all the time and we are sitting there, so I like this way more. Like
more interactive…We can communicate more.
The importance of being taken seriously by this class of Americans and Chinese was a
big first success for Dilin. He had broken from the PowerPoint speeches he gave in his former
teaching to do something “creative” in a “discussion.” Dilin later reported that his university
students in China had not taken his lectures seriously, which made this experience all the more
valuable.
Throughout these three days of classes, Dilin was also noting important differences
between Chinese and American activity systems of English education, as can be seen in Table 2.
Table 2
A Comparison of Key Points in Chinese and American Activity Systems of English Education
(Italicized words come from Dilin)
Language as a
Division of
Object or
Community
Rules
Tool
Labor
Purpose
Non-native,
English is a
Can not really Teachers lecTo take a
Chinese
little English
subject and
use English or
ture; we are
test…to get a
use
testing tool
talk
sitting there
job
Immersed in
To study…
Can use…for
With real
Literacy,
American language rich
to keep up… real reasons &
people; all
communicative
environment
to talk
be creative
participating
competence
Just two weeks into his new studies at an American university, Dilin has done a rather
remarkable comparative analysis of differences between Chinese and American activity systems
of English education. Considering these vast differences, his learning has already been
prodigious. And with a great deal of guided, dialogical assistance, he has positively experienced
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how to lead a discussion in this new activity system of education at Bendbow College. He is
right in saying, “I liked the way that we did this presentation.” “We” is the correct pronoun
because the presentation was a Bakhtinian (1981), Vygotskian (1978), dialogical task drawing on
distributed cognition (Cole & Engestrom, 1993) for successful completion. Though Dilin has had
a learning experience here, it is of course too early to determine whether he has developmentally
internalized the ability to carry out such a task on his own. I wonder how much his participating
classmates have learned from helping Dilin.
Qin’s Rehearsals (9/16,17/2013) and her Foundations class Discussion on 9/18/13
Two weeks later on September 16th, Qin rehearses her discussion leader presentation on
the Wang and Phillion (2009) study. In the first 5-some minutes she reports that though China
has a policy of providing bilingual education in the minority regions, authorities are not allowing
teachers fluent in minority languages to teach, textbooks are not being created in minority
languages, and teaching is conducted solely in Mandarin. She then presents two discussion
questions. The first, however, is actually a request: Your advice for law makers and local
officials to narrow the gap between policy and practice. To this request she has already given the
answers. The law makers and local officials should do the opposite of what she just told us they
are doing. “And the second” question Qin introduces is, “if you as a teacher, how would you
implement multicultural education into your teaching?” This question is general and has no
connection to the study under discussion.
We try discussing these for several minutes. In the group with Lei and Huifang,
Changying begins talking about her experiences studying with Tibetans and how they talked to
each other and took class notes in their own language. Lei engages with Changying to add
experiences about studying with Manchus. Then under my direction to circulate, Qin comes over
to talk to this group and they have a discussion in Mandarin.
When we review how these questions worked for group discussion, Feng says that the
first question is “too difficult…too broad.” Then Changying asks Feng if she had any minority
students in her classes. The workshop as a whole now begins talking about this with interest.
Changying eventually proposes, “You can ask the Chinese students to introduce what we see or
experience in Shanghai. Uh, no, no, no. In China.” Considering class interest about experiences
studying with minority students, this question would obviously be worth discussing. For the
American students in class, I later realize that this question could have been slightly altered to
What do you notice about studying with Han Chinese in this class?
As feedback for Qin’s first rehearsal ends, a student suggests adding a brief video clip to
introduce the topic under study. This was a multimodal technique I had learned as a PhD student
the previous year from Vanderbilt professors to lead my own discussions. I had shared this with
Dilin and the class two weeks earlier. Today’s suggestion demonstrates that a line of apprentices
are becoming more legitimate participants in instituting cultural practices in the community of
Bendbow College (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998; Cole & Engestrom, 1993).
On Tuesday, September 17th, Qin has added an interesting video on Tibetans studying
Mandarin to the first three minutes of her presentation. Immediately after viewing this, she wants
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us to respond as a class to the question, “What the effects of this Mandarin-only policy has on
minority groups?” I jump in with some advice, “Talk to a shoulder partner.” Qin re-cues us to
talk to a shoulder partner. After about four minutes, Qin tries to gather us back together but we
are so engaged in discussion that it takes another minute to get us together. Qin then says, “Okay,
I heard many great voices, and let’s move on to the article.” But I say, “Nope.” “Nope?” Qin
wonders. “No, call on one or two people.” “To share their thoughts?” she checks. “Yeah, with
the whole group.” “Okay, so anyone want to share their thoughts?” Qin asks wryly. Students
eagerly share several thoughts they discussed. Even with good questions, Qin is still learning
how to conduct a class with them. I take advantage of the rehearsal to coach her toward CLT
practices.
Qin then presents her slides from yesterday that report the Wang and Phillion study. Five
minutes later, she gives her revised questions for discussion.

How should officials narrow the gap between policy and practice?
What would the effect of your proposal be on minority language,
literacy, and cultural identity, and the learning of Mandarin as well?
Can you cite studies to back up the effects that your proposal would
have?
Qin now has three questions on the topic of the study. But yesterday’s request, or first question,
is not much different than her first question here today. Again, the answer is to implement the
policies. Her second and third questions show the effects of my suggestions at the end of
yesterday’s workshop. I wondered what the assimilationist, monolingual practices of Beijing
were having on the identity of minorities and their learning of Mandarin. I also had
recommended that they read the other studies slated for the week which would provide answers
to this.
After Lei sees the third question he moans, “Cite studies…” and clasps his hands behind
his head as he leans back in his chair somewhat exasperated. Dilin puts his head in his arms on
the table and laughs at the difficulty of trying to cite studies, too. Qin notices this and chuckles.
They are all in the same boat. Dilin reassures Lei, “Take it easy.”
All of these students are having difficulties comprehending and drawing on class readings
to demonstrate knowledge. While reading, they are also learning new English vocabulary. Dilin
highlights over 60% of the lines in the studies he prints off at the library at five cents a page. In a
notebook he writes columns of vocabulary words from these readings for English study. While
trying to become professional English teachers, they are still learning English.
The readings are also difficult to understand due to unfamiliarity with their academic
form. Reflecting this, their writing scores on the GRE were low, though they all recorded high
TOEFL scores above 105. With a score of 111/120 on the TOEFL, Huifang - perhaps the
strongest writer of the ten and always the first done with drafts and assignments - scored 3.5 on
the writing section of the GRE. With problems understanding language and academic form,
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comprehending the studies is very difficult. This makes it harder to write meaningful questions
for discussion.
But as I adjust cameras, the two groups become engaged in meaningful discussions.
Hearing these, and opinions from them expressed in the whole class wrap-up, the workshop has
no suggestions for question revision. I say it looks like it is going to be “a good presentation.”
We then turn to the day’s second task of editing upcoming papers for Foundations.
The following day in Foundations class, the Chinese dominate group and then whole
class discussions. Reporting to the class on her group’s discussion, Chaoxing says, “I’m really
disappointed with the government in China…I don’t think they will devote much money to
minority language students.” She continues by saying “at least they shouldn’t suppress [them] so
the language can be safe in that way.” But Qin points out that they must “still use Mandarin in
school.” Then another Chinese voice chimes in, “To get a job they must use Mandarin.” Then
from Chaoxing’s group, Lei’s voice projects out over the class, “The Chinese government is not
considering this important…so they are not putting much money in it.” He says that the reason
for this is that China is “not as rich as Uncle Sam…” Capping the discussion with these words of
challenge to the official classroom script (Gutierrez & Stone, 2000), students burst into a
carnivalesque hubbub of commentary (Bakhtin, 1981). Qin smiles even more wryly at the
humorous disorder she was able to facilitate.
Shuang & Chaoxing Rehearsals (10/14,15/2013) and their Foundations class Discussion on
10/16/13
After Qin’s presentation, students in the workshop showed incremental improvement in
developing questions. On September 30th, Huifang’s initial questions were a slight improvement
on Qin’s, even though she was working with a weaker study that didn’t lend itself to engaged
discussion like Wang and Phillion (2009). After her first rehearsal she very actively sought
feedback from classmates, taking notes on their suggestions as she moved around the room.
Feng’s questions the week after showed marked improvement over Huifang’s in that they were
actually related to the study. Huifang, however, found them “overwhelming” in that classmates
didn’t have enough information to adequately address them. Then Shuang and Chaoxing’s
questions on October 14th, and the manner in which their entire first rehearsal concentrated on
the quality of their questions, marked further progression in developing questions for discussion.
Shuang and Chaoxing began their rehearsal by telling us that they didn’t yet have a
PowerPoint to show, but wanted to get feedback on their questions. Shuang read the first, “Do
you remember those teachers who cared and those who did not when you were in school, and
what was the influence of their attitudes and behaviors on you?” Rather approvingly, Dilin
muttered, “Hmmm.” Shuang continued,
I think this is the easy one. We want to draw on their personal experiences
to get started very easily. And the second one is, As pre-service teachers,
what do you think are appropriate and caring gender and race related
13
instructional behaviors? Is that easy to understand? And what do you think
you can do to address these? Cuz we want to talk about some specific ways.
Do you think these two questions are okay or easy for discussion? And easy
to understand?
In rapid fire, Shuang has asked four questions in requesting feedback. She is openly soliciting the
expertise of her classmates for assistance. This shows that she believes that she can learn how to
improve her work by asking classmates for help. Responding to her sincere request, classmates
begin carefully considering the questions.
“Is it too easy?” Huifang asks about the first question. “Too broad,” Dilin says, “The
second question is too broad.” “Too broad,” Shuang echoes. “The first one…” Dilin utters,
before pausing. Chaoxing acknowledges Dilin by saying, “I like the first one.” “Um huh,” a
female classmate affirms. “The first one is good,” Dilin confirms. Lei questions a grammar point,
but drops it when he sees that he is the one who is mistaken.
Then Shuang offers a chance for more feedback by saying, “I do think the second is a
little, is broad.” Then there is a stretch of silence for 10 seconds as they think about this second
one. Yifei suggests putting “race” and “culture” in the first question, and the class talks about
that. Then an extended debate ensues on whether they should include a question or information
on having high expectations for students. Lei brings up the author’s point that “the teachers have
to be the warm demanders” (Gay, 2010) “But in a mild and caring way,” Shuang adds. Chaoxing
describes how that can be put in. A short time later, Yifei says the students can “talk about
stereotypes.” Chaoxing agrees that this would be a good thing to talk about.
The workshop discussed these proposed questions and suggestions carefully, in terms of
the intentions of the author and the Discussion Leader task. They did this amongst themselves for
fifteen minutes without me saying a word. For six of these minutes, I was outside the classroom
to get water during which I ran into a friend for a brief chat. While I was gone, the students
continued their discussion in English, as I later heard on audiotape. They had developed the
ability to use the community of the workshop, its distributed cognition, to effectively improve
their work through dialogue with each other without teacher assistance.
After returning and hearing out the end of their suggestions, they asked for my thoughts. I
said that I thought everyone gave good suggestions and that maybe I would give some
suggestions tomorrow. We agree to meet then at 1 PM. That evening Shuang sends me revised
questions in a PowerPoint.


Do you remember those teachers who cared for your academic,
emotional and social needs and those who did not? What was the
influence of their attitudes and behaviors on you?
Have you ever encountered or heard about teachers’ assumptions
and expectations based on race, ethnicity, social class culture or
14


even physical appearance? What were those assumptions and
expectations?
How will you switch from emotionally-centered teaching to actiondriven teaching?
What are the criteria for appropriate and caring race and culture
related instructional behaviors?
The first question serves as a warm up question at the very beginning of their presentation. The
latter three are their main questions for discussion after they have presented the positions of
Geneva Gay (2010).
Though their classmates had approved of their first question earlier in the day, Shuang
and Chaoxing have edited it. They have specified that groups discuss not teacher caring in
general, but teacher caring for “academic, emotional and social needs.” This edit shows that after
they received suggestions from the workshop, they independently did a closer reading of the Gay
study to more closely align their questions to it. The second, third, and fourth questions use
Gay’s terms. The first two questions do indeed achieve their objective to “draw on their
[(classmates)] personal experiences.” They want to stimulate reflective learning, which Arnetha
Ball (2000) argues is essential to “challenge preconceived notions about” learning and teaching
(p. 232). The third question asks classmates how they will achieve one of Gay’s (2010) essential
tasks for teacher development. Shuang and Chaoxing have incorporated Yifei’s suggestion to
add “race” and “culture,” but not in the first question as she suggested. Weighing her suggestion,
they decided to add it in the second and fourth questions. This shows they not only believe in
actively soliciting class feedback, but they also believe in careful questioning through the editing
process to decide where and how to improve work.
The next day, Tuesday, I step further back from the class work by not recording the
workshop session. However, I do suggest that they tailor questions more closely to classmate
confidence to meet coming teaching challenges in a way relevant to culturally and linguistically
diverse students. They further revise their questions in a final edit to these below, which led to a
very successful discussion in Foundations on Wednesday, October 16th.



Do you remember those teachers who cared for your academic,
emotional and social needs and those who did not? Did their
attitudes and behaviors provoke any positive or negative actions of
you?
At the stage of teacher development that you are at now, how is your
teacher self-efficacy? Are you confident that you can positively
influence the learning of students from diverse backgrounds?
What challenges do you think you will face in culturally relevant
teaching in the future? How will you overcome these challenges?
15
Concluding Discussion:
Reviewing tapes, student work, field notes, and having lived through the workshop, I
clearly find that students progressively learned to make better questions for discussion through
the workshop’s dialogical interaction. Teacher scaffolding and increasing levels of student
discussion and feedback drove this progression, which can be seen over time in Table 1. Through
these forms of dialogue, students learned what the Discussion Leader assignment entailed, which
they reported is quite different than class presentations they were accustomed to giving in China.
In the communicative practices of the workshop, mystudents learned how to hone better
questions by asking for feedback and discussing suggestions. They established stronger criteria
for what constituted good questions. They gained awareness that questions need to be related to
the study and not just be questions about ESL teaching in general. They began to apprehend that
the answers to discussion questions should not be too obvious or given. Yet they also realized
that questions should not be “overwhelming” (Huifang, feedback to Feng, 10/7/13) and beyond
the students’ ken. Questions mustn’t be too technical, but have to personally relate to their
audience. My suggestions on October 15th were a reminder that there is a balance to be achieved
between relating questions to the study and relating them to their classmates’ zone of learning
potential.
While I initially provided more direction in creating and delivering questions for
discussion, I gradually stepped back. Stepping completely out of the picture in the rehearsal of
October 14th, it is evident that the students had developed the ability to achieve the purposes of
the workshop without teacher assistance. However, workshop student learning was “a complex
dialectical process characterized by periodicity, unevenness in…development…intertwining of
external and internal factors and adaptive processes” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 73). Classmates
couldn’t understand how the first 10 minutes of Lei’s rehearsal on October 28th was related to his
study. He was largely talking about his own life experiences and relating disparate learnings
from pre-Bendbow studies that seemed outside the scope of the Foundations course. Feedback
telling him this was gentle, because the class sensed, noticing his downcast gaze, that the hint of
criticism would hurt his ego.
And though Yifei had developed ways and criteria to construct engaging questions for
class discussion, she deferred to her older, strong-willed partner Liqiu in constructing questions
for rehearsal on November fourth. Because Liqiu had chosen not to attend most of our workshop
sessions - attendance was optional but quite high amongst the other nine – she was unfamiliar
with learned ways and criteria for constructing questions. Dilin pointed out that their first two
questions were yes/no questions. Dilin and Huifang said they didn’t have “substantial
information” to go deeper in considering them. Unaware of the workshop’s group norms, Liqiu
challenged them and other constructive feedback while Yifei remained largely silent. Yifei later
agreed that she should have taken a greater leadership role in their joint work. Nonetheless, these
step backs in the final two rehearsals reinforced and augmented previous learnings in the
workshop, as students drew on these to eventually persuade Lei, Yifei, and Liqiu to make
revisions so they could achieve success in leading their Foundations class discussions.
16
Throughout this learning process students gained critical insights on the differences
between Chinese and American activity systems of education. Progressively higher levels of
dialogic work showed they were becoming more communicatively competent in Bendbow’s
system. Despite persistent worries that their English was inadequate, most of these newcomers
did not hesitate to speak in classes, contributing important thoughts that advanced group and
class discussions. Comparing their taped speech in 2013 to what they say in conversation now, it
is obvious, too, that their English has improved dramatically.
These successful learning experiences may transfer to future professional practices of
communicative language teaching. However, this remains to be seen. Supervising the practicum
teaching of Shuang and Changying in the spring of 2014, I saw both traditional and CLT
pedagogy. In Shuang’s first observed lesson, she followed a more traditional, transmissive,
teacher-centered approach with her adult students. But in her following three lessons, she
presented materials and questions so that her practicum students could communicatively engage
with each other. Changying implemented CLT practices in her first two lessons, but in her third,
was distracted from her communicative plan by student questions on words for kitchen utensils
and cooking directions. She reverted to teacher-centered telling and explaining. In the postlesson reflection she said she didn’t want to do this, but just wanted to help meet the needs of all
of her students. Meeting all student needs was a major message in her courses.
I could relate to Changying because throughout rehearsals for Discussion Leader
presentations, I also lived the teacher’s moment-to-moment dilemma of when to assist and when
to hold back. In October I suffered a mid-semester crisis in this regard. In my fieldnotes I wrote,
“I am wondering if I have been talking too much, been too authoritative, had too many good
ideas for the group.” I worried that I had interfered with student ability to develop autonomous
learning habits. But after venting these feelings of self-reproach for nearly two pages, my writing
turned to the necessity of coaching in teaching, actually showing students how to do things, like
a dance or welding instructor would do.
Two days later for lunch, I met my supervising professor, who was teaching the
Foundations course and advising these ten students. She told me they were reporting that the
workshop was really “valuable,” more so than their classes in the university’s ESL language
center. She reported them saying that in the workshop they “really learn some important things to
help their work” (My Fieldnotes, 10/16/13).
Though I have been reliving my own teaching mistakes in continuing analysis of these
recordings from a year ago, the writers’ workshop was promoted to a one credit, required course
this fall semester of 2014. And it is fair to say that it has met the call of Dilin Liu (1998), Jun Liu
(1999), and Skinner and Abbott (2013) to provide a necessary dialogical space of support for
international students of TESOL to work on academic assignments, reflectively question
practices, revise ideas, and change ways on the path to teacher development. These researchers
say that such support is absolutely necessary for international students in the U.S. to succeed in
the hard work of adaptive cultural transformation required for academic success (Jun Liu, 2004).
To achieve his own cultural transformation Liu said, “I conducted numerous ‘experiments’ on
17
myself in adapting to this special social setting – the academic classroom” (Liu, 2004, p. 30). It
is not surprising that this transformation involved asking questions of his new surroundings.
Through their rehearsals and presentations in the fall of 2013, my students, too, certainly learned
the importance of asking good questions for meaningful communication to learn as a community.
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