Learning to teach in a research-oriented school-based language teaching programme

This article reports on a research-oriented school-based language teacher education programme in Australia in which native speakers of Chinese were trained to be teacher-researchers while teaching in Australian schools. Qualitative meta-synthesis was employed to analyse, synthesise and interpret teacher research produced by teacher-researchers so as to understand their learning in the programme. This meta-synthesis reveals that by acting, observing, listening and reflecting, the teacher-researchers developed further understanding about pedagogy as well as themselves. Findings of this meta-synthesis support the use of a school-based setting for developing contextualised understanding about pedagogy, and for teachers to construct a teaching self in the specific context