4.1 Introduction

As O’Reilly (2008, p. 203) argues, “What appears to be merely descriptive is actually part of the (ethnographic) analysis”. This chapter commences with a thick description of the research field (the city in which the research was conducted, and the three universities at which the research participants are based). A detailed description of the author’s positionality or how the researcher as ethnographer gradually approached and familiarised himself with the field is provided and examples of the reflexivity practices engaged in are given. Ethnography requires acknowledgement of research as value-laden (Hammond & Wellington, 2012) and knowledge as situated (Thomas, 2011). Positionality and reflexivity are employed as approaches to reflect this; in another word, the function of positionality and reflexivity is to let the readers use the researcher’s eyes and see the current study in the researcher’s view. The four cases involve EGP teachers transiting to teaching EAP, each of which begins with a narrative elaborating the life history of the teacher, and continues with the author’s interactions with them (demonstrating how his position and relationship to them developed and influenced the data production). Concepts and themes extracted from each case were also listed and analysed.

4.2 Thick Description

4.2.1 Field Context

Shanghai is a municipality in China termed the “Oriental Manhattan”, experiencing a period of metamorphosis. As the economic, financial, information technology, and cultural centre in China, Shanghai had a population of 24 million in 2014 (14/Feb/2017, http://www.geohive.com/earth/cy_notagg.aspx). It is an internationally recognised global financial centre (Yeandle, Mainelli, & Berendt, 2005). Shanghai is also an important centre for higher education in China, with more than 70 universities, 30 of which are nationally celebrated.

University A specialises in commercial, finance, management, economy and foreign language studies. It has an exceptionally international outlook and it recruits overseas students. To date, the students at university A have been given multiple opportunities to participate in studying abroad programmes; the majority of its student body is from Shanghai. EAP courses are taught by college English teachers in the Business English Department, and EAP pedagogy takes the form of project-based learning. All newly recruited students are tested and grouped into three levels: A, B and C, and then only students at the first two levels study EAP.

University B is a polytechnic-oriented comprehensive university, listed among the top 50 universities in China, and between 400 and 500 in the 2015 Times World University Rankings. It is managed directly by the education ministry and its history dates back to the 1950s. The university does not officially recommend EAP; however, some teachers advocated EAP reform under the instruction of the Shanghai education bureau. University C is a practice-based industry-oriented public university managed by the Shanghai education bureau. EAP reform is implemented there with the support of the university.

4.2.2 Positionality of the Author as a Researcher Entering the Field: Summary of Field Notes

Ethnographic fieldwork and writing take a long time. They depend on intimate ties and attachments, and they entail a good deal of travelling (Scheper- Hughes, 1992, p. 534).

Befitting the nature of positionality, this section provides a first-person account of the researcher’s relationship to the field of study.

I first heard about the Shanghai EAP reform from my roommate, Yixuan, with whom I had studied for the same major at Edinburgh University in the UK. At that time, it was my second month after returning to China having completed my MA at Warwick University. I called Yixuan, who had just attained a lecturer post at University C. When I asked about his current situation, he told me that his university was participating in the Shanghai EAP reform and so in the process of making changes to the CET course. As a student who had undergone many difficulties with academic English, I was excited when hearing that universities in China had started to pay attention to EAP. I was delighted and eager to learn more about this. I also realised the Shanghai EAP reform could become my research topic.

In early April 2014, I was offered a Ph.D. position by The Hong Kong Institute of Education, now The Education University of Hong Kong. I chose to investigate students’ academic writing in Shanghai’s EAP reform, at which point I had no resources with which to conduct my study but Yixuan, my old friend. Thus, I started to connect with people in my telephone address book, particularly searching for those teaching English in universities.

After some searching, I connected with Michael, a friend I had once studied with at the University of Birmingham. He is the head of department in college English at a key university in Shaanxi province. When I asked him whether his university was also implementing a similar EAP reform to that described by Yixuan, he said yes and encouraged me to observe his class. I booked my flight ticket to Xi’an and went directly to Michael’s university. Michael was very hospitable and gave me the entire set of textbooks his university uses, arranging for me to listen to his lessons, introducing me to his students and arranging for me to meet the Associate Dean of the foreign language college to discuss my research, and inviting me to audit the meetings his colleagues held regarding the course reform.

When observing Michael’s teaching, I noticed that his students’ English proficiency was very poor, at times Michael even had to use full Chinese to teach and interact, and many of the students were poorly motivated, with some even reading books unrelated to the lesson in class. Michael allowed me to question several cohorts of his students and I asked them how many were planning to pursue further education. To my surprise, only two–three out of the seventy-eighty students responded affirmatively. This discovery led me to start worrying about the feasibility and benefits of teaching these newly enrolled college students about academic English and research.

Later, while attending Michael and his colleagues’ meeting, I witnessed a very loud quarrel as the teachers were feeling both overloaded and confused about the new reform. Coordination among teachers, the registry and other departments was chaotic, and even the classroom numbers were too few. However, during my conversation with the Associate Dean, he told me the university was not implementing the EAP reform as this was just for the universities in Shanghai. My visit to Xi’an seemed to have been wasted, although I had acquired a lot of information from it. I felt the Shanghai EAP reform might have similar symptoms. I also felt that if students’ English proficiency in Shanghai is as low as those in Michael’s class, it is unlikely that significant changes in their writing will be observable in a short timeframe, and my Ph.D. study period is very limited. Therefore, I decided to sway my attention away from students’ academic writing, as noted in my first fieldwork entry.

After returning to Hong Kong, I reported my experience and reflections to my supervisor. Before making another visit, I, therefore, chose to read materials about language policy and to read the printed policy concerning the Shanghai EAP reform carefully, to see whether I needed to employ it in future research. At the start of Nov 2014, the third month of my Ph.D. studies, I booked a train to Shanghai with the intention of speaking to Yixuan in person to see what kind of research I could do in Shanghai.

On the train, I kept writing down ideas and reading reflections until I arrived at Shanghai station. I met Yixuan at his wedding, helping him to take charge of the chorus and using appropriate moments to ask his opinions about the EAP reform. At the wedding, I also met other colleagues of Yixuan, both of whom gave me their opinions. They both expressed their objections to the reform, in particular citing their students’ unsatisfactory English proficiency and confused future career paths and the unsuitability of the reform to the situation in China, which was thought-provoking for me. However, they had not taught EAP at their universities, they were teaching other English courses instead. Nevertheless, in view of their opinions, I urged Yixuan to introduce to me teachers directly responsible for teaching EAP at his university. Just one day before I left Shanghai, Yixuan introduced me to Rui. I invited her to lunch and casually asked her some questions about EAP; however, the meeting was overly short and she seemed very careful when talking to me and refused to let me visit her class for my research. After the meeting, I made some rough records on my laptop, but I felt I did not quite understand the relationship between Rui’s experience of EAP teaching, and the data presented in the academic sources I had been reading. However, at least I now knew a teacher teaching EAP, and with some hope and trepidation, I concluded my first academic visit to Shanghai.

Upon my return to Hong Kong, I felt that maybe my knowledge of EAP had been too limited to the investigations of language issues, resulting in an incomplete understanding of other EAP teachers’ epistemology. Thus, I started to expand my reading selection, moving from updated EAP materials to philosophy and education theories. Leading up to my second academic visit to Shanghai, I remained in regular contact with Rui, and during the interval, I linked my reading with the teachers’ opinions of EAP and my own reflections, which I thought might be useful for my research. My second academic trip to Shanghai was in February 2015, after the winter vacation. I took some of my writings to Yixuan and Rui, intending to discover their ideas about my new understanding and to learn about the EAP pedagogy being implemented. We all met in a Starbucks, and after several months of contact, Rui was a little more familiar and relaxed with me and so shared some of her ideas about the current EAP reform. However, I started to puzzle over the relationship between my designed EAP pedagogy and the contexts in which the reform was being implemented in Shanghai. With many questions remaining, I once more returned to Hong Kong.

In the following months, I continued discussing my thoughts with my supervisors and peers and reading literature on EAP. I decided to contact the Shanghai EAP policymaker by email. I explained in the email who I was and that I would like to investigate the reform; fortunately, he replied expressing a willingness to see me in person. I booked another train ticket to Shanghai.

It was beginning of July of 2015, when I arrived in Shanghai, I took a taxi for the hour-long ride to Fu Dan University where the policymaker, Cai, was located. I gave him a present I had carefully chosen in Hong Kong, and we discussed the current reform and our different ideas about EAP. From the conversation, I realised his knowledge of EAP pedagogy was old-fashioned, and began to understand the reasons why I had sometimes had difficulty comprehending what Rui had told me about the EAP reform guideline. Cai gave me some materials and told me I was welcome to discuss my research plan with him in the coming semester.

Attaining the support of a higher level individual reassured me and I began to sense a pathway opening up for me. I thought that with Cai’s help I would not only be able to access EAP teachers and students, but also see how the curriculum functioned at different universities. I redrafted an entire research proposal, aiming to compare EAP teaching at different EAP participant universities. After sending the proposal to my supervisor at the beginning of October 2015, I decided to discuss my intentions with Cai in order to make sure my research plan could go ahead. However, when I once again sat beside him, he persuaded me to change my Ph.D. objective once again, asking me to help design an EAP test so he could assess Shanghai students, otherwise he would not be able to help me. Later in the discussion, no matter how hard I tried to explain the potential significance of my research to the Shanghai EAP reform and the possibility of introducing an effective EAP pedagogy subsequently, he rejected my suggestions out of hand.

I knew I could not rely entirely on Cai anymore, I decided to use my other human resources to connect teachers teaching EAP under the reform. At that time, I made telephone calls, and sent messages to many old friends working in universities in Shanghai, hoping they could introduce some clues to me. However, none of my friends knew anyone involved in the EAP reform in Shanghai. I felt cornered, so to help me, my mother contacted a friend named Z (pseudonym) who was working as a university Chancellor in Beijing, and had some relationship to the Chinese education system.

I bought a train ticket and travelled to Beijing to meet Z. On the train, I was unsure that these family connections would help me contact teachers. The next afternoon, I met Z in her office, and as the top person at the university, she was busy. She spared ten minutes to catch up with me, and told me she had arranged the department’s Dean of English to connect professors in Shanghai for me, and passed me a list of phone numbers for all the recommended professors, she comforted me for having the resilience to keep studying and sent her best regards to my mother. On the way back to the hotel, I texted all the listed professors politely and decided to go directly to Shanghai to wait in case some of them wanted to see me in person.

Arriving in Shanghai, I devised a full schedule to see the different professors. I saw all the professors recommended by Z across Shanghai, and one of them (Professor Ella from university A) was luckily the Associate Dean on the committee for the Shanghai EAP reform. With Ella’s help, over the next three weeks, I established initial contact with some EAP teachers directly, finally setting foot in the field. In order to make sure what kind of research I wanted the teachers to help me with, I decided to return to Hong Kong to share my experiences and discuss the possibilities for my research. Weighing the resources, I could access, and after attaining the permission of my supervisory panel, I decided to look at the EAP teachers’ EAP knowledge and teaching. Preparing a rough research direction, I sent it to Prof. Ella for further agreement, and with the promise of her support, I bought another train ticket for Shanghai in what was already the middle of November.

This was my sixth academic visit to Shanghai, having established cooperation with several EAP teachers, including Fielding and Lisa. In the coming two months, I almost packed my schedule full in order to fit into the investigated teachers’ timetables. On this field trip, I got to know some EAP teachers from other universities in Shanghai, and even travelled to other cities to meet them at EAP conferences.

In an EAP conference in Suzhou, I met Bluewitch from University B in Shanghai. In the following days, in my communications with Bluewitch, no matter in person or online, I found she and her colleagues were fighters for the EAP reform. I started to become interested in not only the EAP teachers’ pedagogy and understanding of EAP, but also in the experiences they had in transiting to EAP. Balancing all the data I had acquired, I suddenly found over the years since 2014, I had been immersed in the environment of EAP reform, and most of the data was generally ethnographic and phenomenological. When I finished this academic trip, I proactively put my research into a systematic research proposal, which was approved by my supervisor panel and examiners. Everything was then on track. In the year after my confirmation for Ph.D. candidature, I collected ethnographic data daily online from WeChat, and conducted another two field trips to Shanghai to complete the data analysis, sometimes as a participant and sometimes as an observer.

To summarise, the field trip to Shanghai to observe and interact with EAP teachers spanned from 2014 to the end of 2016, in those two years I took one trip to Xi’an, one trip to Beijing, one trip to Suzhou, and eight journeys to Shanghai, connecting with whoever I could to get closer to the EAP teachers and establish relationships. What I experienced, or my positionality, to different extents had formulated my interpretation of the field; a thick description of such experiences will thus help readers to contextualise the study and crystallise my value and “lens”. Though Hammond and Wellington (2012) warned such reports of positionality might appear narcissistic and self-indulgent, it is better to include them than not, because:

With ethnographic research, we start by imparting some descriptive findings. We might want to give…some storytelling…what appears to be merely descriptive is actually part of the analysis…descriptions enrich ethnographies, providing crucial background information. (O’Reilly, 2008, p. 203–204)

In terms of reward, I met the teachers below and by interacting with them, I gradually joined their community as variously an EAP teacher, helper and/or an EAP scholar. Most importantly, these experiences facilitated the crystallization of my understanding of the EAP reform in Shanghai and the development of four ethnographic case studies as shown below.

4.3 Case Study 1: Fielding

4.3.1 Life History of Fielding

Born in the early 1980s, when China had just started its Opening-up policy, Fielding always held different opinions from his peers about learning English. Fielding’s statement: “I don’t believe rote remembering vocabulary would make one study English well” (Fielding interview 1), questioning the approach taken by thousands of Chinese students learning English. Learners traditionally memorised huge amounts of vocabulary, and recited recognisable grammatical patterns. However, Fielding assured his readers, claiming, “I believe English can be learned from doing as John Dewey suggests” (Fielding interview 1).

This story dates back to the Shanghai of twenty years ago, when there were few automobiles on the streets, no tall towering buildings, no internet, no air pollution, few commercial advertisements regarding English language training and not many foreign visitors. Children at that time had not started learning English at a young age. Fielding started learning English only in his final year of primary school at the age of 11.

At that time, English textbooks were written and edited by the education bureau, and their content was closely associated with the status quo in China and the lives of Chinese students. Few students perceived the relevance of learning English, although Fielding was an enthusiastic student of it and studied hard. When he later became an English lecturer at university, he continued to express gratitude towards these textbooks for enhancing his grammatical foundation, although his knowledge of English based upon them was not satisfactory in his own opinion.

Upon admission to secondary school, Fielding learned from friends that the series, New Concepts English, published by Longman had been imported into China. He was also aware that a training school had begun teaching using these textbooks, and so he joined without hesitation. New Concept English triggered a new wave of English learning in China, becoming a compulsory course at many training centres in China. Fielding skipped the first book, due to good English proficiency and started learning directly from the second book; impressed by its interesting articles and the clipped Received Pronunciation accents on the audiotapes.

Within a year, Fielding finished the second book, from which he gleaned a lot of knowledge that he would otherwise not have acquired from existing school textbooks. During the three years at higher secondary school, while preparing for Gaokao (National College Entrance Exams in China), he taught himself a third book, New Concept English. Later he was recruited into the East China Normal University, majoring in English literature.

Unlike the students recruited from places outside Shanghai, many received a weaker English education in their hometowns. Thus, as Fielding had a better foundation of English he quickly stood out among his peers. However, his excellence did not make him arrogant; he modestly followed his teachers in each class and felt empathetic for his classmates with social justice in mind: “my roommate is from Sichuan, majoring English like us, however, his English foundation is weaker, while the assessment for him is unfair” (Fielding interview 1). Fielding realised that problems within the education system meant his roommate was unfairly treated, rather than the English programme itself; therefore, the only solution would be to improve equality in education. By chance, Fielding read a book on education and social justice translated by one of his sisters, and this book enlightened him with theories in education, which later became the focus of his research interests.

In his spare time, while majoring in English literature, Fielding showed less passion for reading classic world literature in English. In contrast, he hunted out a job in local training centres, teaching English to everyone, ranging from young beginners to adults. While teaching, Fielding realised his English dramatically improved, particularly when teaching English grammar. He benefitted considerably from learning through teaching, later coming to understand this in reference to a theory proposed by the American educationist John Dewey: learning by doing. With these experiences in mind, he reinforced the notion of learning English by using and doing, and in the following years, he persisted in his habit of “learning in a random manner”, successfully passed important English tests, including the TEM-8 (Test for English Majors band 8).

After a 4-year study at university, Fielding developed his identity as an English teacher and an educationalist, concentrating not only on furthering his disciplinary knowledge but also on education of students. He completed his BA, writing a dissertation on educational social justice. Following graduation, he began his Master’s studies at the same university, majoring in English literature. His supervisor had a developed research interest in Australian higher education, aligning with his own interests.

During his postgraduate studies, Fielding started reading academic journals pertaining to Australian higher education and the internationalisation of higher education, gradually coming to recognise differences between academic and colloquial English. After graduation, he was recruited by the university he now works into teach English for General Purposes; he has taught using TBLT (Task-based language teaching), and CLT (Communicative Language teaching) pedagogies. After years of sustained effort, he became a head teacher within his department and a teacher trainer. Meanwhile, his concern for international higher education brought to his attention the IELTS exam that non-native speakers of English are expected to take before going to study in Australia. He began to study the exam and then teach it in other training centres. By teaching and relating IELTS to his academic experience, he found the academic part of IELTS was essential for Chinese learners if they were to access international higher education successfully.

Later he was appointed as the director responsible for designing the EAP curriculum at his university. He directed his educational ideals and experiences towards English language teaching and designed an EAP curriculum based on project-based learning. To better facilitate his research and teaching, Fielding applied for a part-time Ph.D. position in the East Normal University. As an EAP teacher, many years of experience of teaching and research made Fielding feel his experiences were “saliently changing his opinions on learning English… particularly in understanding what should be like in university level English teaching… and understanding students’ characteristics” (Fielding interview 1). Fielding has also been invited by a variety of organisations to demonstrate his EAP teaching.

4.3.2 Getting to Know Fielding

4.3.2.1 Initially Rejected but Later Accepted My Invitation

Befitting the nature of reflexivity, this section provides a first-person account of the researcher’s relationship with Fielding. Professor Ella, who is the Dean responsible for the EAP reform at a university of Shanghai, recommended Fielding during my first visit with her. Ella was once Fielding’s mentor and is now a department head; furthermore, they are close friends. Fielding and I did not meet each other until my second visit to Shanghai. However, before that, when I had finished my first grand tour of the research site in Shanghai and returned Hong Kong, Ella had forwarded my general research aim and research questions to Fielding, and stated that Fielding was willing to help. However, a few days later I emailed, texted, and phoned Fielding to double-check his availability but I got no response. As an educational researcher I was following the principle of recruiting voluntary participation, so assuming that Fielding was not happy to participate I decided to look for another participant.

On my second visit to the research site, Ella asked me about Fielding’s reply, and I revealed to her that Fielding did not appear to be available and I was fine with that. However, Ella insisted that Fielding was the right person for me to do this research with and phoned him in front of me, reminding Fielding about the study and his interest in participating. I felt grateful but was also embarrassed by Ella’s hospitality, and was afraid that if the participant did not join on a voluntary basis, my research might violate ethical rules and the results might not be valid. As urged by Ella, I made another phone call to another of Fielding’s mobiles, and in the phone call I rechecked his willingness to act as a research participant. During the call, he confirmed his availability and we made an appointment to meet each other the next day in a restaurant.

The first impression Fielding gave me was of a noble and polite teacher, and he spoke with confidence, firmness, resilience and some pride. Educated at a first-tier university in China, he had already completed his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees, and is now pursuing his Doctorate part-timely. From the conversation, it emerged that he has broad research interests, including English language teaching methodology, educational studies, higher education, learning theories, cross-cultural communication, discourse analysis and English writing. Currently holding the post of course leader for EAP at his university, he is responsible for work including teacher training, course and student management, and teaching. Compared with myself, he is a more experienced teacher.

During the initial meeting with him in the restaurant, I did not audio-record our conversation, as the purpose was to get to know each other and most importantly win his trust and cooperation. I also gave him a present to thank him for participating in the research. At this time, I showed him the informed consent, so that he would be aware of the need for details and that his name, position, university he is affiliated to, personal opinions and classroom behaviours would not be shared with anyone else including Ella, as I was concerned that his participation had been coerced by Ella. Besides the necessary induction process, I let Fielding dominate the conversation, and we covered topics ranging from personal hobbies to work-related experience.

4.3.2.2 Did Fielding Tell Me What He Really Believes?

After the initial meeting, Fielding agreed to be interviewed in his office. I used a prepared interview guide for the first semi-structured interview, which was similar to the one Ella had forwarded to him, but I added a few questions that had arisen from the content of our talk over lunch. I felt he was very cooperative and open when giving me his answers. When speaking about examples of class practice he gave specific details; in terms of his personal history in learning and doing research, he explicitly related information to his current teaching and spoke with confidence. When I asked for his comment on the EAP course at his university, he was positive and expressed his critical opinions about the EAP reform. During the interview, Fielding started to speak before I finished, and this was beneficial, because it meant he could dominate somewhat and proactively contribute. From the cues mentioned, Fielding demonstrated confidence and authority when elaborating. However, when asked how he defined EAP, he seemed more reserved about his answer, compared with how he answered other questions. Furthermore, Fielding’s replies in most cases sounded authoritarian, and he seldom used hedges; however, when asked what he thought about EAP, he used many tentative discourse markers; for example, “吧” (a discourse marker of negotiation in Chinese):

(M: the researcher, A: Fielding)

H:

How do you define EAP? Do you think….

A:

I think EAP is a teaching pedagogy, a curriculum, focusing on using English in a particular discourse, a context. Because it is English for academic purposes, it is used more frequently in academia and higher education (Fielding interview 1).

My interpretation of this is that after learning my role as an EAP researcher and someone “expert” in the field, he might be confident about how he teaches and his perception of EAP in Shanghai. However, when asked about his understanding of EAP, he might have felt he was being judged or assessed by an “expert in EAP” or “someone Ella sent to me”. Therefore, he gave me a definition that was quite close to what was reported in the general Shanghai EAP framework (Cai, 2013). It could also be that he was unsure whether his other classroom behaviour or beliefs belong to EAP concepts; thus, he gave me information relating to a concept he had acquired from somewhere else. Either way, Fielding feared judgment, and so chose to stay in a safe zone. Therefore, I assume that the above definition does not reflect his entire understanding, partially as I am the first outside researcher he has met.

4.3.2.3 Uncertain of What Is EAP Himself at the Beginning

As Fielding and I got along with each other from the time of the first interview, I frequently observed his classes and joined in talks with him on his private social media, and we sometimes communicated after class time about topics ranging from tea drinking, to activities within society. Therefore, his trust in me gradually increased. However, although we were able to engage in open communication, I felt that the communication between us was confined to a working relationship rather than being uplifted to that of a personal friend level. Perhaps distance remained between us because of the power relationship I perceived. Due to the difficulties I had encountered accessing EAP teacher discourse, when I met with Ella or Fielding, I was positioning myself as a student seeking help from them, so I demonstrated my humbleness in order to achieve access. In addition, Fielding was a little reluctant to admit me to his innermost thoughts, and as mentioned based on his background, I assumed that he was somewhat proud at that time, and this meant I was kept at a distance from him.

However, after some subsequent incidents, the power relationship between us changed. In a conversation over lunchtime, we spoke about which EAP theories we knew to be applicable to Shanghai. I also casually mentioned a few EAP researchers and some EAP terminologies I had read in books. Ph.D. researchers in EAP recognise EAP concepts as common, so I did not realise the impact on other people when I quoted the academic literacy theories of Lea and Street (2000) to Fielding. However, he seemed to get a glow in his eyes and repeated: “yes, Lea and Street!” (the author’s field note, 25 November 2015). Seemingly, he was surprised to discover the person in front of him was not simply a student as he had once thought, but was actually an EAP expert. After this conversation, he spoke more about his own research to me. Later during the class break, Fielding came up to the seat I usually sat in the classroom, although when I first began observing his class he seldom spoke with me. He spoke about his own research ideas and sought recommendations of books, asking if I had known any materials relating to academic writing and critical thinking. I instantly remembered an essay written by one of my supervisors, and quoted the name and the year of publication to Fielding. Exceeding my expectations, Fielding became even more excited and animated, he said: “I just read his article! He is your supervisor!? Yulong, we must have more communication in the future!” He then always introduced me to his students, telling them my real identity and encouraging them to cooperate with me. Just before I finished my field trip in 2015, I received a call from Fielding. He said he had just had a meeting with the EAP teachers in his department, and warmly welcomed me to conduct a seminar about EAP for his colleagues. Hearing that, I was very happy but as a gesture of modesty, I said: “I don’t know whether I have sufficient knowledge”, but Fielding’s reply really assured me that his trust in me was firmer than before: “Even with 1/10 of your ability you could give them a seminar” (the author’s field note, 4 December 2015).

From that moment onwards until now, Fielding and I became good friends; we often talk over social media, giving each other new information about research opportunities, and encouraging each other. We even hope to embark on an exchange to study in London in the future.

4.3.2.4 He and His Colleagues Were not Clear About EAP

In a further unstructured interview over lunch with him, we once again referred to his understanding of EAP and his practice when teaching it. During this conversation, I could feel that he had become more open and less reserved. He abandoned his reserve and directly informed me that he and his colleagues were not clear about EAP themselves: “Because there were no guidelines or a document telling us how we should teach EAP, except for the policymaker of the reform who required that we teach certain academic skills …we started to think of what academic purposes are and to refer to our own learning experience” (Fielding interview 2). This reply corresponds well with why he gave me a definition of EAP, as this obviously did not represent his understanding.

4.3.2.5 Designing an EAP Course Out of His Own Life Experience and Belief in Education and Language

Fielding agreed that his experiences had a tremendous influence on his EAP teaching: “First of all, my English teaching background laid a fair foundation … then my BA and MA were neither on just linguistics but … on broader education theories” (Fielding interview 1).

4.3.2.6 Fielding as a Believer of Learning by Doing

According to Fielding’s narrative, he has been tremendously influenced by macro theories of education, and as such has been reluctant to position English learning in a micro and technical manner: “I finished my BA in English by submitting a dissertation in educational justice and my MA is also about English but my dissertation is about higher education in Australia” (Fielding interview 1).

For this reason, his focus on EAP teaching always differs from that of “those who study literature or linguistics … their emphasis might formulate their learning and teaching habit” (Fielding interview 1). On the contrary, “I did not put my focus onto English linguistics and literature” said Fielding, “albeit there exists some micro focus, at the end of days, I am used to looking at education in a wider context… make (ing) me not stress the learning on specific points of language” (Fielding interview 1). In an excerpt from Fielding’s EAP course induction, a sentence reflects his ideology about learning English by using: “We do NOT study English, but we do learn how to USE English” (Fielding class material).

Just as he said he does not stress language learning knowledge, he encourages students to learn EAP by engaging in research projects:

We are using problem-based learning in EAP course. There are tasks under each project. By doing task one after another, students could step by step make progress…we put our emphasis of EAP teaching on guiding them to complete projects, letting them experience it like what John Dewey suggests “experiential learning”; learning by doing… it is our current focus (Fielding interview 1).

Fielding coordinates the EAP course at his university with this belief in mind, and has developed an EAP course characterised by project-based learning (PBL). Recalling an observation made by students at Fielding’s university, reporting their entrance into society and conducting research in shops and on the streets in order to complete projects for EAP, I confirmed with Fielding if this reflected his thinking.

Fielding: Yes, I ask them to do research.

Into a real context, do they become real researchers?

Yes, they may still feel they are students in front of the teachers, but when they are outside the campus or they do research on campus, they have become researchers, and everything around them, no matter people or contexts, becomes their research objects and research background, which involves students into realistic contexts. This is what experiential learning emphasises: putting learning in contexts… knowledge will transfer… when classroom learning and out-of-class learning is connected (Fielding interview 2).

Another aspect of learning by doing, as Fielding explains, is letting students learn by trial and error:

During their project making, they would design questionnaires, but at the beginning, they would design it from intuition and life experience, which would be absolutely different from making a questionnaire supported by theories and tools; thus in our classroom interaction, they would challenge each other (and their questionnaire design) and they would know what difficulties they may face in data analysis, validity, and reliability… via such constant review of their own thinking and doing things… their original identity… may clash with the environment or the standards our teachers and students made for them… such clashes gradually assimilate them, and their identity turns… and see everything in the eye and identity of researchers, which is identity construction… they will see things differently before and after the course… we are able to achieve that (Fielding interview 2).

However, Fielding is modifying the pedagogy: “we are reflecting in the process, and we feel just doing projects is still problematic, because the students are learning English; so we are making an equilibrium between them” (Fielding interview 2) (Fig. 4.1).

Fig. 4.1
figure 1

Examples of students’ questionnaires and presentations

Full size image

4.3.2.7 Fielding as a Believer in Language Acquisition Theory

Fielding told me, “I assume that language should be acquired” (Fielding interview 1), reflecting his recognition of the importance of language acquisition theory, in order to avoid neglecting student’s English language learning in EAP:

Why do we ask them (students) to do projects? Because the most authentic academic English is in academic journals. If they want to do projects, they have to do a literature review, and they will read and input this into their writing, and they may unconsciously imitate (academic English), no matter they are copying or paraphrasing them; we are using such organic integration (PBL) to help them to understand what academic English is like and master it at last… It will become their organic component in their integral literacy. Reading for the project is input, so is watching and listening; constant writing and rewriting is output; when input is with output, language proficiency is forged (Fielding interview 2).

These views were not only applied to his EAP teaching; Fielding had transferred his belief in language acquisition from CLT to teaching EGP. However, Fielding also pointed out that there is concern among his students and maybe all Chinese English learners: “some students feel unsafe when teacher is not asking them to recite and rote” (Fielding interview 2). Analysing the origin of such insecurities, he related the possible reasons for his years of teaching experience: “having been teaching English writing for years, I found Chinese students’ writing is highly institutionalised by their teachers asking them to rote templates and fixed structure” (Fielding interview 2). “Writing itself is an art form, if such an artistic creation becomes institutionalised, it is problematic … everybody is different, so what remains in their head should be different after reading” (Fielding interview 2), by pointing out the danger of such institutionalised “security-giving” mode of English teaching, Fielding also explains the reason why language should be acquired:” it (reciting words and phrases) is still an artificial environment, which is inadequate for learners to remember” (Fielding interview 2).

Therefore, he comforts students that express worry: “I suggest students broaden their reading, which could offer them a natural language context, when new words and expressions appear in a natural context, their meaning and implicit meaning will make sense holistically, then the understanding of words may be more accurate” (Fielding interview 2). In this vein, students being taught in a framework based on PBL are broadening their reading.

As mentioned earlier, students learn from the experience of doing project work, as this should be well balanced with how they acquire academic English while preparing for and producing the results of the projects, which characterises their EAP pedagogy. These two activities seem to have been finished mainly by the students themselves, in other words, Fielding’ EAP class concerns students’ autonomy. Moreover, Fielding’s learning and teaching experience is influencing his EAP teaching. In an excerpt from Fielding’s course induction, he also demonstrated: “We do NOT learn vocabulary and grammar, but you have to ACQUIRE that by yourselves” (Fielding class materials).

4.3.2.8 Teaching IELTS Helps EAP

Fielding told me that he teaches IELTS writing, and that in his opinion, IELTS as a representative of academic writing to a large extent corroborates his teaching of academic writing in EAP: “I began to teach IELTS in 2009. IELTS reading and writing are bent to EAP, as its purpose is for doing academic study not for immigration… I teach A band (Academic Band of IELTS) and thus it thoroughly transfers to teaching EAP, and while teaching IELTS, I acquired knowledge (of EAP)” (Fielding interview 1) (Fig. 4.2).

Fig. 4.2
figure 2

This picture demonstrates how Fielding use IELTS writing materials to meet lesson objectives to guide students to integrate what they learn from textbooks into graphs, drawing and writing

Full size image

More specifically, Fielding compares the requirements in IELTS with the practice of teaching EAP: “I do recommend incorporating IELTS writing into our current EAP teaching, if students could master them, they could master their EAP writing”; because, “those IELTS writing prompts are classical, created by authority; they made those tables, and if students can write these prompts, they will be able to describe their own charts and tables in their studies; so such good authoritarian materials should be well used” (Fielding interview 1). He then relates the different components of the IELTS writing test to the specific needs of EAP students:

[T]he small writing task of IELTS assesses students’ data description and analysis, which almost covers all the needs of students across majors, for example, flow charts are how medical and polytechnic students describe their experiments… the big writing task (of IELTS) are divided into discussion, argumentation, and problem-solving, which are all important in academic writing; all that is assessed in IELTS writing is what is required in students’ assignments (Fielding interview 1).

In this vein, apart from the autonomous learning Fielding has been encouraging, he also incorporates prescriptive English writing suggestions for students to prepare for their project writing.

4.3.2.9 Supporting Learner Autonomy as a Reflection on Chinese Students and Their Education Contexts

Based on the theory underpinning Fielding’s PBL and his description of language acquisition theory I imagined that he also supports autonomous learning. I particularly looked for evidence of this when speaking with him. For example, from what Fielding described his expectation of students: “We hope they can gradually learn the language from doing projects”, and his suggestions for his students are also about language acquisition: “you can choose what you think is important to you and acquire that” (Fielding interview 2).

His search for learner autonomy is also a result of his in-depth insider’s views of higher education and the challenges encountered by Chinese students:

To me, a very important part of higher education is socialising (students), I want them to become proactive participants, rather than what they were in foundation education (in China), to accept whatever the authority offers; particularly, in such a booming internet world [however] from the hangover of foundational education in China, Chinese students are used to the state of being passive learners, or consider themselves receivers, or are treated as containers (of knowledge) by others; (their learning principle is) do not drop any knowledge the teachers give them to become successful learners. However, in higher education, we know that students should be active learners, and sometimes will transfer to researchers (Fielding interview 3).

Thus, this mode of teaching is clearly different from his description of the traditional English class, in which students wait to be taught by teachers. In a recent online discussion among EAP teachers, I observed some EAP teachers were arguing about how to teach the philosophical thoughts of Socrates and Confucius’ philosophy to students as a warmer to build learners’ cultural awareness of differences between China and the West (as shown in the picture below, some of their dialogue is selectively translated). Fielding, after seeing the other teachers’ opinions finally claimed: “As we are teaching academic researchers, the students’ autonomy is what should be considered, which is also a guarantee to keep students’ motivation in a long run, thus we should avoid over-directing (them)” (Fielding’s comment is circled in red, see Fig. 4.3).

Fig. 4.3
figure 3

Fielding’s communication with other EAP teachers online

Full size image

4.3.2.10 Understanding Chinese Students

As mentioned in the previous paragraphs, Fielding has a set of famous metaphors to describe the obligation of transforming the “container of knowledge” form of Chinese students to active researchers (Fielding interview 2). As a man being raised to receive a foundational education in China, and to later pursue education abroad, the researcher cannot agree more with this comparison. I am sure Fielding’s in-depth understanding of Chinese students arises from his long years of teaching: “having taught English to students from all age groups, I have an in-depth understanding of their needs, lacks and wants” (Fielding interview 2).

Although I did not directly ask Fielding how he defines the needs of EAP students, in our conversations he criticised some expert-level course developer for taking students for granted and only cares about knowledge giving:

[T]he experts … are highly motivated (when they are designing some English courses) … but our students are even unmotivated … many of their interests (in learning English) have been vanquished in the past, besides they have many disciplinary modules to take, and in this case, they often sacrifice their time spent on learning English for other modules … (if they) sit there with ‘no brains, souls, and motivations’, professors from Harvard or Stanford cannot teach them well; but we are a group of common teachers with mediocre academic preparation and limited teaching skills, better than the students anyway, as long as we design the course well (students may still get involved)… (Fielding interview 2)

However, Fielding did not explain explicitly the needs of Chinese students; although in many communications with him and his students, and after immersion in his classroom, I gleaned that Fielding believes empowerment is what the Chinese EAP learners really need: “the process of education depends on students (and their learning) rather on teachers”. Otherwise, “ignoring such requirement, even if the course designed is ideally academic, they may not be interesting (to students)”, as Fielding hypothesised: “So I assume we should have ideal goals (to tailor the course more for an academic direction) but what is more important is how to pass on the best content to the students” (Fielding interview 2).

Just before I finished my research journey in the field, I spoke with Fielding’s students in a group interview, and some of his students’ feedback really interests me. They claimed that having taken Fielding’s EAP course they had come to realise that their previous English writing would never have been accepted by the relevant academic units (if they wanted their work to be published), and so now they are using the eyes of researchers, and understand what the academic register demands. When I referred this back to Fielding, he confirmed this view, adding that:

The entire design (of the PBL EAP pedagogy), intends the students to complete different tasks in different stages of learning, and in order to satisfy the requirement of the course and the teachers, they have to switch their perspectives to look at things; during the process (of students’ switching their perspectives), we assume the ocuurance of reconstruction and recognition of their identity (Fielding interview 3).

4.3.2.11 How Does Fielding Understand EAP?

Between the first interview and the end of the research, almost two months had passed. During those two months, Fielding and I had had many opportunities for communication and discussion about his teaching principles. We reviewed his English learning history as well as the pedagogies and principles underpinning it, and our discussion to some extent prompted Fielding to rethink what EAP means to him. In addition, where my hypotheses were not supported he was more open about giving me different answers. One day when I was walking with Fielding in a lunch break, I once again asked Fielding how he understood EAP: “Now what do you finally think of EAP after so many conversations?” He replied, “I used to have such sophisticated feelings (about his EAP), but had not formulated them into a complete conceptual framework… but I have been implementing them” (Fielding interview 3).

At this moment, as a researcher believing in the benefits of interpretivism, I was happy that our constant communication had not only enriched me with the knowledge I needed for my ethnography but had also helped him untangle his understanding of EAP; which is, as Alexander (2012) emphasised important for all who teach it. As defined by Fielding:

EAP is based on English teaching, aiming to transfer students’ awareness and identity (as a researcher), helping them to act as a member of the academic community to solve problems in reality; however, as we are faced with Chinese EFL learners, we cannot ignore nurturing their English language skills and literacy while teaching critical thinking and research methods (Fielding interview 3).

However, in May of 2016, when I paid another visit to Shanghai, I observed several sessions of his class and when I later spoke to Fielding, he seemed to have developed a new and higher understanding of EAP, thus: “students being able to use English to understand the world, and to think critically with an international horizon via the lingua franca, which could later equip them to be on the cutting edge in their future work” (Fielding online interview, May 2016).

4.3.2.12 What Does Fielding Think About the EAP Shanghai Guideline?

The local education bureau printed the Shanghai EAP guidelines, claiming they were a critically important policy and instructing all EAP teachers at participating universities to abide by them, covering specific theories and pedagogies of EAP. Meanwhile, the EAP reform committee organised some teacher training sessions aiming to help previous EGP teachers to adapt to EAP teaching as swiftly as possible. With this in mind, I attempted to seek information from Fielding regarding how much information of value he could deduce from the formal EAP guidelines.

In the first meeting with Fielding, I asked him what he thought about the guideline and to what extent his EAP teaching differed from the instructions given in the guideline. He stated, “they are more or less similar, because we refer to the requirements of it when we design our teaching goals” (Fielding interview 1). As our friendship grew, I asked him again about how the guidelines instruct his teaching, and received a different answer from that given in previous interviews, he admitted “the framework is relatively general and failed to provide some specific teaching methods” (Fielding interview 2).

As I was struggling to align his different opinions on the Shanghai EAP guidelines, he gave another justification for his disagreement with the guideline, which assured me of his honest sentiment: “we agree with him (the policy maker) that EAP should be taught in universities, but I disagree with his (the policy maker) ideology and approach” (Fielding interview 2). In addition, he noted that the framework in the guideline was too broad, failing to offer a detailed pedagogy and teaching method. As Fielding also noted, the teacher training organised as part of the Shanghai EAP reform committee is not especially systematic: “they normally organise some seminars and workshops; I was invited to teach at a workshop; the job was to introduce how I teach, which is more like communication; but in terms of the training in (EAP), there is less systematic training due to many reasons.” For Fielding, there is insufficient formal EAP training available to help himself and other former EGP teachers to adapt to EAP.

Furthermore, Fielding spoke at great length about the guidelines for the Shanghai EAP reform. Firstly, he suggested that the Shanghai EAP framework’s theoretical position is SFL (systematic functional linguistics), which he considers shallow:

His (the policy maker) suggested EAP pedagogy is skill based… perhaps it is under the framework of SFL, due to his (the policymaker) background as a linguist, and he is more likely to teach EAP from a linguistic perspective… but success for a person arises from the combination of all their different abilities, even though students can produce abundant vocabulary in an accurate register, they are not able to have their own ideas, and are unable to communicate, unable to do research, and unable to propose their own arguments in a group discussion… thus, they (students) will ultimately turn into craftsmen rather than Masters (of academia) (Fielding interview 2).

Fielding criticises the guideline as missing the clear requirement of encouraging students to learn EAP through doing research, asking:

How come Chinese students do not need to investigate a real problem? They need it… in such a globalizing world … (if without it) how can they (students) cooperate with researchers from abroad? … (if without it) they (our students) would be disadvantaged, for they could only write report (for others) … but the idea is other’s, they will never enter the core (Fielding interview 2).

On the other hand, to Fielding, the Shanghai EAP framework is not concerned with the potential identity transformation of EAP students:

To me, a very important part of higher education is socialising (students), I want them to become proactive participants rather than what they were in foundation education (in China) to accept whatever the authority offers; particularly, in such a booming internet world, in such circumstances, how many teachers can claim they are authorities, when students can google everything out… (Fielding interview 3)

Furthermore, Fielding is dissatisfied with how the policymakers responsible for designing EAP guidelines separate out teaching content. For example, when I mentioned that the policy-maker said he engaged in critical thinking about what he thinks of as the essence of his EAP concepts, in the fourth (last) textbook he published (which is recommended for students to use in the last semester of their EAP courses), Fielding criticises this approach:

Critical thinking should not be taught separately and confined to the last textbook; not letting students know what critical thinking is until they start to use the last textbooks is unreasonable… thinking should accompany all class activities… I often mingle things together in order to teach… I think teaching critical thinking separately itself leads to a lack of critical thinking (Fielding interview 2).

4.3.2.13 Teaching EAP Concepts Holistically

As with the discussion concerning critical thinking above, Fielding also preferred to mingle other components of EAP when teaching.

In the first interview, he offered me a description of how he mingles the different elements of EAP holistically in a single class:

(EAP) as a language course, I ask students to read the input after and before the class, and in class, I encourage them to output the language they learn; in order to do that, I organise group discussions and debate … let them listen to different opinions and thus help them to learn to discuss when opinions are divergent, and even to learn how to argue back… (To achieve this aim) I also emulate some similar contexts… I brought them an IELTS writing topic: do you think education should focus on higher order thinking… for we (at that moment) were going to learn a lesson about college experience … in order to prompt their discussion, I also found an article, in which the author complained that university students in the US lack critical thinking (a kind of higher order thinking) … after I analysed the texts for them, they should manage to locate some arguments, from which they could choose a topic for debate… normally before class they have to do background research and after class they still have to do more research and reading (Fielding interview 1).

As Fielding commented, when completing lesson tasks, students not only learn to devise arguments, but also to read, search for resources and build their awareness of critical thinking. This then makes it possible to teach EAP as an inclusive whole.

During a classroom observation session of Fielding’s class, his holistic teaching was in evidence. The lesson was to introduce psychology to students. Before the class, some background materials handouts were distributed to students as pre-reading materials. On one of the handouts, Fielding wrote a guide for readers, reminding the students to recall and revise what they had learned from the previous chapter when reading the new handouts:

Readers’ guide

When reading this article taken from the official website of the American Psychological Association, remind yourself of the knowledge and skills you learned from Chapter 1 , such as definition writing, topic sentence writing and paragraph structure. Meanwhile, this reading material will provide you with the needed background information to the learning of Chapter

When introducing different psychological concepts to students to raise their awareness, Fielding also encouraged group activities to share their reading and complete some group tasks. When reviewing reading materials for psychology, Fielding highlighted the academic reading and writing skills he expected his students to learn. For homework, Fielding asked students to read an article entitled The Trait Approach to Personality and then to work in groups of four to five to use one of the psychological theoretical models as the basis of a questionnaire in English. The assessment of the homework would be based on the learners’ performance in the group presentation of the questionnaire and the quality of the questionnaire itself. Fielding also encouraged students to conduct research in the library or/and online to learn how to design questionnaires. He particularly emphasised the value of students using theoretical models to construct questionnaires (Table 4.1).

Table 4.1 Tally for content coverage in Fielding’s class (content adapted from classroom observation of Fielding, Nov–Dec, 2015)
Full size table

Two weeks later, as a continuation of the class, the students were asked to deliver group presentations introducing their questionnaires, while Fielding and the rest of the students gave comments. During the observation, I recorded the feedback Fielding gave to students, which reveal his holistic blending of EAP knowledge for delivery to his students:

4.3.2.14 Benefiting More from “Self-trained” Than Sponsored EAP Training

In my first meeting with Fielding, knowing he was one of the model teachers invited to demonstrate for other teachers, I asked him for some details regarding the EAP training he has been receiving. I said: “Did they (the Shanghai Education bureau and EAP reform committee) train you to teach EAP? Or anything similar to that?” He responded, “Very little, they often organise some workshops, in which I was invited to introduce my own EAP teaching; it is more like communication not systematic training” (Fielding interview 1). He also mentioned the EAP reform committee was cooperating with the Education First (EF school), providing teacher training for EAP teachers in Shanghai; however, the program is self-funded, and most teachers cannot afford to attend.

Fielding claimed that before they started the EAP course at his university, his department organised a two-week-long teacher training event in conjunction with some universities in the UK. When I asked about the relevance of the event to EAP, he explained it was the teacher training summer course held at language centres in universities, and dealt with teaching methodology, teaching objectives, activities organisations and comparative education and identifying differences between EGP and EAP in terms of teaching goals. Rather than feeling well informed after completing it, Fielding said: “it is just very general”; and when I asked him to what extent the training helped his EAP teaching and knowledge, he stated that: “Not that effective, because I had already known what I should teach in EAP, it (the training) just further enhanced it” (Fielding interview 1).

His reply did not surprise me, because as indicated in previous sections, his current EAP awareness and teaching principles were highly related to his previous teaching and research experiences. Quoting his words, “we started to think of what academic purposes are and to refer to our own learning experience” (Fielding interview 1). Being a doctoral researcher himself, he is proficient in EAP and aware of the differences between EAP and EGP. He described: “the distinctions between their purposes (EAP and EGP) will lead to everything hereafter”; and also remarked: “having taught English to students from all age groups, I have an in-depth understanding of their needs, lacks and wants”, and “ignoring such requirement (the needs, lacks, and wants), even if the course designed is ideally academic, they may not be interested (to students) … what is more important is how to pass the best content onto the students”. Thus, his EAP teaching is built upon his experience and he can be termed “self-trained” (Fielding interview 2).

4.3.2.15 EGP-EAP Relation: Using Different Tasks for Different Purposes

Fielding uses one sentence to describe the differences between EGP and EAP: “The distinction in their literal meaning, is what I think, the most direct distinction (between the both)” (Fielding interview 2). Fielding further explains the results generated by the different aims between EGP and EAP; hinting that there are differences in discourse, “EAP stresses on some different linguistic features, perhaps in the perspective of systematic functional linguistics… yes, discursively different”. He explained that, in teaching practice, “when I design an EGP course, I stress the linguistic training (of students), but for EAP I am probably concerned more about if their skills could be actualised in linguistic activities and I ask them (EAP students) to make arguments, during which they will use some corresponding language structures” (Fielding interview 2).

Fielding is currently teaching both EAP and EGP at his university. He seemed to have no prejudice against either approach, when answering my questions regarding whether there are differences between teaching EAP and EGP. He claimed that there is a somewhat small difference between them, but said such differences are not that complex, explaining that Fielding provided the example of teaching EGP students critical thinking skills in the later phases of teaching, rather than merely English sentences and phrases.

He also expressed vague differences in how he offers teaching resources and materials for students in EAP and EGP: “for general topics (in EAP), I provide them with general resources, but if I could find some materials with more academic orientation that would be even better” (Fielding interview 1). When I asked him about the extent of the academic orientation of materials for EAP students, he responded, “I would not look for much academic journals for them (students), unless they are asked to do research project (PBL) and write literature reviews… in common classes, my resources come from, e.g., American Times, Economist (semi-professional magazines on economics; Fielding’ students are majoring in similar disciplines with economics)…” (Fielding interview 1) Although he did not identify the materials he used for teaching EGP, he established that the materials he used for EAP are not on at the extreme in terms of being academic, except when preparing for some academic tasks. However, in Fielding’s EGP classes, he also favoured using tasks for communication purposes: “I prefer task based language teaching (TBLT) and communicative language teaching (CLT), both of which I use more frequently; these two methods (TBLT and CLT) could be applied …to EAP… (in EAP) we use PBL, which contains many tasks for students to do” (Fielding interview 1). To him, teaching EAP involves using different language tasks to teach English for a purpose that differs from EGP; thus, the former is not an extension of the latter but diverges from it.

4.3.2.16 Nurturing Ethical EAP Learners: Do not Become an “Exquisite Egoist”!

In two of his EAP classes in May 2016, in relation to the topic Business Ethics, Fielding distributed three scenarios to students majoring in international business and management for critical thinking and discussion: “Is it ethical for you to sell cigarettes to those who are not aware of the bad effects of smoking, like young people?” “Is McDonalds ethical when selling children junk food with toys?” “A US company manufactures pesticide, although their products were banned from use in the States. Is it ethical for them to sell the products in India?” (Class observation of Fielding, May 2016).

In the class discussion, many students expressed agreement or disagreement over whether the above scenarios are ethical. Fielding also used questions to provoke students to consider the ethical decisions they made; for example, he asked: “From the perspectives of business, it is good; from the perspectives of a CEO, do you think it is applicable?” “If I connect smoking with a successful business man, do you think it is ethical?” (Class observation of Fielding, May 2016)

When a student explained why he believed that selling junk food together with toys to children is “legal”, Fielding responded with some emotion: “Can being legal represent being ethical… being legal does not equate to being ethical.” Another student added: “McDonalds selling junk food is fair enough, for in China, many restaurants sell worse food than McDonalds” (Class observation of Fielding, May 2016).

After several rounds of discussion, Fielding concluded by reminding all the EAP students to be ethical in their future careers, for fear of them to become “exquisite egoists” when making commercial decisions. After the class, I asked Fielding the reasons why he had designed such a session involving students. The answers he gave astounded me, for I had not previously been aware that Fielding has an in-depth perspective on education in China: “Influenced by the negative environment, education has become utilitarian and short-sighted, and so it is my responsibility to lead students to think responsibly and uprightly, and this is my obligation as a teacher”. Continuing by linking this class activity with his EAP perspective, he added:

The core of EAP as I understand it is students being able to use English to understand the world, and to think critically with an international horizon via the lingua franca, which could later equip them to be on the cutting edge in their future work. So commercial ethics is associated with my understanding of EAP… because (students) have to understand how to make ethical decisions in consideration with specific cultural norms, territorial features, and contextual factors (Fielding online interview, Jun, 2016)

4.3.2.17 Unveiling Fielding’s Smooth Adaptation into EAP from EGP

Fielding explains that he did not feel it is being unusual to be teaching EAP when he transited from teaching EGP, as not only does he use TBLT for both EGP and EAP, but his long years of EGP teaching have familiarised him with local students’ English learning needs and the characteristics of education in China. This enables him to design a more tailored EAP class for his students; therefore, as he himself summarises, “I feel my background of English teaching offers me a solid foundation” (Fielding interview 1). In terms of his academic background, apart from his familiarity with academic English and research knowledge, what he values most is how his research interest in educational social justice, international higher education in the contexts of Australia and issues of overseas students allows him to see EAP not from “a micro perspective focusing on only linguistic knowledge like those (EAP teachers) who learn linguistics and literature” (Fielding interview 2). In other words, his academic background gives him a broader perspective from which to view EAP as part of internationalised higher education and society.

On the one hand, Fielding has a critical understanding of Chinese students and China, but on the other, he is aware of what it means to be an overseas students seeking higher education abroad. He, therefore, positions his PBL EAP course at the intersection between both, following his own critical reflection:

How come Chinese students do not need to investigate a real problem? They need it… in such a globalizing world… (if without it) how can they (students) cooperate with researchers from abroad? … (if without it) they (our students) would be disadvantaged, for they could only write report (for others) … but the idea is other’s, they will never enter the core… to me, a very important part of higher education is socialising (students), I want them to become some proactive participants rather than what they were in foundation education (in China) to accept whatever the authority offers (Fielding interview 2).

Generally speaking, Fielding’s background, regardless of his previous teaching in EGP or academic knowledge, encourages him to see EAP teaching more critically and holistically: “my research and teaching experiences saliently changes my opinions of learning English… particularly in understanding what should be like in university level English teaching… and understanding students’ characteristics” (Fielding interview 2).

4.4 Case Study 2: Lisa

4.4.1 Life History of Lisa

Lisa is a scholar in applied linguistics, whose area of interest is discourse analysis. Born in a family with a democratic approach in Shanxi province, she recited short articles in English from childhood. She was later accepted as a student at Shanxi University, studying English literature as her major and philosophy as a minor. As a postgraduate, she attended Xi’an Jiaotong University (a famous institute in west China) to study medical English. Influenced by her supervisor, she nurtured a broader interest in genre and register. As she recalls, being an English major graduate she was not interested in issues relating to medicine or medical English, however, when she was on the medical studies campus she reluctantly started to read materials related to medicine. Gradually she was able to understand professional patterns and terms, ignoring more sophisticated content that could not be understood; which, according to Lisa, was when her ESP learning took place.

After obtaining her Master’s degree, Lisa was recruited by the university at which she is now working. Despite much experience learning and researching English, she seldom wrote any academic research in English. Indeed, she did not understand the meaning of academic English until she went to Birmingham University as a visiting scholar. While studying at Birmingham, she cooperated with other scholars and completed some research, which she was determined to publish. After submission, her essay was returned by a journal editor who claimed Lisa’s academic writing was poor. Feeling frustrated, she asked a well-educated, non-academic native speaker to correct her grammar and spelling for her before she made a second submission. To her surprise, the paper was returned again with similar comments from the editors. Feeling confused, Lisa started to use her discourse analysis experience to locate the problems in her academic writing and adapted her academic register and style accordingly; in her words: “learning the patterns used in published work”, or “pretending to be academic”. This experience helped raise her awareness of the importance and uniqueness of academic discourse, and it also assisted her in conducting research into using EAP.

In my first interview with Lisa, she told me the importance of being trained as an academic before teaching EAP: “I think many teachers nowadays, including some of my colleagues in our department, may not have a deep understanding of those academic patterns, unless they have some publication experience” (Lisa interview 1). When she returned from Birmingham, she became involved with the EAP reform in Shanghai, and by coincidence, the EAP curriculum at her university employed project-based learning.

Unlike Fielding, Lisa has an applied linguistics background, and her training at Birmingham University taught her that teaching students EAP actually means teaching them how to prepare for academic research and publication. Normally Lisa guides her students in a logical process before they can finally produce a research idea: “I started by giving them advice on research topics and planning… I evaluated the difficulty and availability of the students’ projects” (Lisa interview 1). Later Lisa helps formulate students’ academic English: “after that (research project supervision) I teach them academic writing, for example how to write an introduction, how to write a discussion” (Lisa interview 1).

In conjunction with her EAP teaching, Lisa gradually senses that she, as a language teacher, has limitations in terms of connecting EAP with students’ disciplinary knowledge. Just as when I participated in Lisa’s project supervision, I helped a group design a case study of a market-related project, but the case study they understood was entirely different from the case study I intended them to undertake, due to my educational research background. Therefore, I, as an ethnographer, immediately understood Lisa’s challenge. Without a commercial background (the discipline of most of Lisa’s students) … she had gaps in her knowledge that made it challenging to supervise students’ commercial related research projects.

With a background in English literature and philosophy, Lisa comments that she finds that EGP has the function of immersing students in humanity, but that EAP is utilitarian. The humanity that EGP welcomes should not be wholly negated by the utilitarianism of EAP: “I used to read English novels with students (in EGP), now I don’t think I can…education is missing (in EAP) …disregarding humanity in subjects of university education is horrible” (Lisa interview 1). For Lisa, merging humanity into utilitarian EAP is an ideal format of EAP education, so she has done her best to include articles written by philosophers, sociologists and literary figures, to encourage her students to consider the value of knowing their roles in society, the goals of academic research, and the importance of critical thinking.

4.4.2 From Knowing to Participation

Befitting the nature of reflexivity, this section provides a first-person account of the researcher’s relationship with Lisa. After an initial introduction by Fielding, I came to know Lisa well. After sending her text messages, we made an appointment in her office for an initial interview. She was open-minded, and always responded quickly to my questions. She was late for the first interview, but she texted me apologising for the inconvenience. When we met we had a very easy conversation, and even found that we shared some common friends. Lisa and I swapped our WeChat contact details and added each other as friends. At Lisa’s invitation, I later regularly visited her classes and helped tutor her students’ research projects.

4.4.3 EAP Is a Logic and “Disguised” Language for Doing Research

As mentioned in the narrative about Lisa, when I asked her for a definition of EAP, she explained it as a method for preparing students for the academic research and publication:

I think (EAP) is a kind of logic, which has two levels of thinking, the lower level is critical thinking, and then the higher level, logical thinking, is what researchers use for doing research… (the latter) is very important if students would like to deduce logically, for example how to have and resolve an (research) aim, how to experiment with the aim, and how to analyse it (Lisa interview 1).

Apart from the logic, Lisa had learned from her own international journal publication experience that EAP also involves teaching students to disguise their colloquial use of English by adopting “the patterns used in published work”, in other words, what she terms to “pretend to be academic” (Lisa interview 1).

4.4.4 Lisa’s Perspective on the Distinction Between EAP and EGP and the Shanghai EAP Reform

With her background in English literature and philosophy, Lisa believes that EGP serves to immerse students with humanity. Moreover, although it is utilitarian, the humanity that EGP welcomes should not be totally negated by EAP; she states, “I used to read English novels with students (in EGP), now I don’t think I can…education is missing (in EAP)… disregarding humanity in subjects of university education is horrible” (Lisa interview 1). To Lisa, merging humanity into the utilitarian EAP is an ideal format of EAP education, so she does her best to add articles from a range of sources, as mentioned above to improve her students’ criticality.

In the first interview, Lisa gave me the abovementioned understanding of EAP, which also informed her teaching. However, there was another underlying meaning of EAP for Lisa, which she did not tell me about until the last session of my observation. Lisa showed a video clip of the students, it discussed the goals of academic research and its contribution to humankind and society. Sitting among the students, I was attracted by the video, I was assured that there might be some students who would be similarly attracted to the video and became more aware of the reasons why they were studying EAP; i.e. to become researchers and contribute to society. In a further interview after class, when I shared with Lisa what I had learned from her lesson, she pointed out her advanced perspective on EAP, which she had earlier failed to mention to me:

This (EAP is a tool to hone academic research, which is potentially beneficial to humanity) is what people failed to understand in EAP, and it is what the policymaker (of Shanghai EAP reform) failed to do… he (the policymaker) merely focused on how to improve students’ academic essay writing, but if we dig into the concept deeper… there is a lot to do (Lisa interview 2).

Generally speaking, for Lisa EAP has a humanitarian meaning to contribute to the human world.

4.4.5 Giving Prescriptive Discursive Samples

Lisa often gives her students samples of academic writing, the following screenshot (Fig. 4.4) is a page of sample writing Lisa presented as an example for students:

Fig. 4.4
figure 4

A demonstration of student writing in Lisa’s class

Full size image

Register analysis: In March 2016, Lisa proposed a new method of teaching EAP: after teaching the students different registers in the class, Lisa asked her students in groups to use different registers for writing about the same topic in groups. For example, one group member wrote a personal diary, one member wrote an academic article, one wrote a poem and another completed a news-style piece on the same topic; then working in groups the students posted their work online to enable more students to comment.

4.4.6 Inserted Humanity into EAP Teaching

Lisa complemented many students on the philosophical articles. In one of the observations, Lisa led the students to analyse an article written by Alfred North Whitehead reflecting on modernity and modernism. By studying this article, the students not only learned how to write better English, guided by Lisa, they also discussed the ideas raised by the article author. Later Lisa told me that this article was from a book related to Western Philosophy, and she had chosen many articles from it: “I found this book by accident, I think it is suitable for EAP…there are materials related to science, philosophy, and economics… these are all from big names” (Lisa interview 1). Furthermore, Lisa quoted one of her students’ feedback after reading one of the articles Lisa had chosen for them: “she (the students) understood how to express personal opinions, how to express an existing reality…it is always a good phenomenon that she began to question” (Lisa interview 1). Lisa also uses media-based materials to inform students, as she recalled, around the military parade in 2015, she brought in media reports from different countries, encouraging students to compare and to think critically. Just as Lisa described herself during a classroom observation session: “my philosophical background inevitably ushers students into in-depth thinking” (Lisa interview 1).

Lisa also reflected on the current reform when speaking with me:

(The EAP course recommended by the Shanghai EAP reform) is missing out some educational elements; it is so instrumental that it started to become utilitarian, which is so horrible… deserting humanity… it (EAP) would become just an instrument and it makes students utilitarian (Lisa interview 1).

Therefore, Lisa attempts to put as much human content into her lessons, stating: “I hope to embellish the course with humanity, then we are not utilitarian” (Lisa interview 1).

4.4.7 Empowering Students and Helping Them Make Their Voices Heard

Lisa prioritised student’s empowerment by letting them decide upon and handle their own research projects, and she stepped back as a facilitator and a careful listener. As the product of a democratic family, Lisa passed on this quality to her EAP classrooms; returning autonomy back to students, which effectively supports the nature of experiential learning. Her approach to teaching encourages her students to share their experiences with her, and she was able to report on a lot of feedback she had received from students completing EAP research projects, as illustrated below:

It was a horrible morning. I still felt scared, I had intended to investigate the influence of traditional culture on companies, but I was involved in a place surrounded by big mountains. Actually it is good to do farming as practice (in mountains), but the people we noticed (in the company) looked brain washed, they each looked like walking dead, having little words but stagnant eyes. This company even asked its staff to read the mantras of Buddha and watch videos of religions… having a strange ceremony before meals… strange masters teaching the unity of heaven and earth. When we asked the manager about how to run a company, he even told us that the god will run the company for him… what is worse is that when they heard we planned to leave, their attitude turned bad… we were lucky that we are a group of students, otherwise we might not have got out… we finally sought our way out of the mountains by ourselves… (Lisa teaching diary)

The students’ openness with Lisa gave her some insights that an EAP teacher might not usually see, and these made her realise the limitations of her EAP teaching and the reform itself, as she noted when quoting from a students’ feedback:

“During noon break, a group of students doing PBL in the Song Jiang university town kept talking about their experiences in project interviews: last night a group of government officials from the Song Jiang university town met them, but all the officials were beating around the bush about answering the questions. The students could not find any statistical data to support the situation regarding entertainment, estate, and new enterprises. They suspected the relevance of such activities with English learning… they lacked social resources, specialised knowledge, they felt stressful and unsettled… I suggested they narrow down their research topic, for example, they could just investigate the education companies, but they felt they could spare no more effort to knock on the door of society. There remain more examples of students lacking social resources while doing PBL EAP. For example, students could not find graduates to investigate their living condition, students could not find companies to do a case study. If the university does not link educational settings to society at large, how can we as language teachers guide students to do academic social research?” (Lisa teaching diary).

4.4.8 Locating Problems in EAP Reform and Teaching

Lisa worked well with her students and this leads her to readily identify the potential problems of teaching EAP. Just as she reported in her presentation to the Shanghai EAP committee: there are currently four challenges as she sees them (see Fig. 4.5).

Fig. 4.5
figure 5

Lisa’s perceived problems with the Shanghai EAP reform

Full size image

Through my supervising Lisa’s students’ EAP projects, I also encountered some challenges personally. For example, I felt that EAP teachers are confined by the gaps between their own and their students’ disciplines. This is because in the tutoring session, I was giving one group suggestions about their case study in a research project, and when I shared my knowledge of case study as a research method in educational studies, the commercial background students were very confused. They told me that they had learned about case studies in marketing, and what they had learned is completely different from my schema for case study research. Realising the discrepancies, I shared my experience with Lisa, and she expressed her worries that disciplinary issues also posed a challenge to her own EAP teaching. Furthermore, I spent nearly twenty minutes tutoring a single group of EAP students; however, in each class unit, there are about ten groups, and Lisa teaches two classes each year. As research tutoring happens every other week, Lisa was using her extracurricular time to fulfil this obligation. Thus, EAP pedagogy was taking up a lot of Lisa’s spare time, posing another challenge for her: “if I cancelled students’ inter-group cooperation, my workload would be extravagant” (the author’s fieldnote of Lisa, Nov, 2015).

As a tutor, when I was communicating with another group of EAP students, the students complained that they had to change their research methods repeatedly even though they had arranged their research topics with Lisa. This is because they needed to interview a governmental department head, but the interviewee kept refusing to offer constructive feedback, making it impossible for the students to achieve valid results; and therefore, they expressed their expectation that the university should provide more social resources for them.

After commenting and tutoring many EAP students’ research projects, I found that the very informal relationship between the university and the societal resources on which it depends were apparent in the dissemination of EAP students’ research findings. Although the students reported on and demonstrated their research practices in class and at a forum at the university, the research sites and contexts barely afforded the student researchers any data. If the university and the local community had forged partnerships or had been working in cooperation, then the students’ research might also have been more constructive, thereby benefitting society. Both aspects related to the loose relationship between the university and social resources are consistent with Lisa’s presentation.

4.5 Case Study 3: Bluewitch

4.5.1 Life History of Bluewitch

Born into a military family in Sichuan Province of China, Bluewitch was not particularly interested in learning English until she was of middle school age. She spent most of her time concentrating on learning maths, physics and chemistry. In her national college entrance examination, she achieved 88 out of 100 for her English, and for this reason, in the mid-1980s she was recruited by East China Normal English to study international business as a major and English as minor.

At the beginning of the 1990s, after four years of undergraduate studies, she was admitted as a postgraduate without the need for any exams. Her postgraduate research area was applied linguistics and her specific research direction was English teaching methodology. What is noteworthy is that her batch of the postgraduate study was the product of cooperation between her Chinese university and the British Council, and one of the requirements of enrolment was that graduates must agree to be teachers and teach at the East Normal University after graduation. She taught English at the university for two years, and then moved to University B to begin teaching. However, University B is a science and technology oriented institute, so Bluewitch found the students there did not take English seriously. English was deemed a general course and the teaching time assigned for English was very limited, and English textbooks were considered too simple for students (students are required to learn a few English articles each semester).

Bluewitch is a responsible teacher and she believes that the approaches currently taken for teaching English might not fulfil students’ needs, so she has been searching for effective theories and methods to improve the existing methods. At the start of her research journey, she believed the input hypothesis would benefit student learning. Therefore, she edited an English reading book for students containing more than 100 articles with topics ranging across different areas. By adopting these methods, she intended that her students’ English would improve in response to a large amount of input. She also paid attention to distance learning. She merged the online chat room, QQ (a social media software) and RenRen (another social media website) into her mixed learning pedagogy, encouraging her students to go online to study English.

She later realised that learning is also connected with students’ psychology and cognition, so she commenced her probing of the hidden cognition of students’ mistake making when learning English vocabulary. To achieve a deeper understanding of students’ cognition of learning, she chose to study psychology at East China Normal University as a visiting scholar where she was supervised by a famous professor in psychology. With the help of her supervisor, she was taught to design questionnaires analysing students’ psychological characteristics, which was predicted to be informative for her teaching. During the study, she coauthored several research papers in international journals with her supervisor. However, her supervisor was not competent in writing papers in academic English, so all the published papers were translated by Bluewitch. Bluewitch was depressed by the fact that all the studies and papers were completed by her, but her supervisor took the accolade of the first authorship. All these contacts with scholars during her academic visit to China East Normal University led her to realise the limitations of Chinese academia and in particular, the urgency to encourage knowledge of EAP.

Meanwhile, she also afflicted experienced objections and boredom from her students when reading additional English articles and completing psychological questionnaires. Some students thought Bluewitch’s teaching was outside the sponsored English curriculum set by the university and they complained about this to the Chancellor. Although the Chancellor supported Bluewitch, the department was annoyed with her. After reflecting on her students’ hostility towards spending extra time studying English, she realised their only motivation for studying English was to pass exams. Bluewitch thought that improving her students’ English learning attitudes actually depended on altering their worldview of education and improving their autonomy of learning, rather than simply altering the teacher’s teaching methods. She also felt that the reason for students being unmotivated to learn and infatuated with exams was a hangover from learning habits the engaged in a middle school; i.e. learning for exams. Therefore, she identified a need to help newly enrolled university students overcome the idea that the point of learning is to pass exams. Therefore, this opinion illustrates how her teaching switched from emphasis on pedagogy to emphasis on education.

Subsequently, when she was about to be promoted to a professorship, her deteriorating relationship with the department meant that some of her departmental superiors placed obstacles in her way, and as a result she did not attain the level of recognition she deserved. Feeling angry and gloomy, she flew to a university in Florida, USA to work once more as a visiting scholar. During her visit, she witnessed the higher education system in the USA, and how their undergraduates began writing essays and engaging in academic activities as soon as they were enrolled. She also saw how the language centre at the university, as an academic language provider, cooperated with other academic faculties. After comparing this approach with the higher education system in China, she realised the Chinese higher education was lagging behind in her context and that undergraduate education in her university was unsatisfactory. Specifically, Chinese undergraduate students lacked academic training and mental acuity to become scholars. Moreover, the university in China had no palpably academic environment.

Her supervisor in the States is a professor in language and literacy, but Bluewitch was unfamiliar with what the term literacy referred to. After some research, she learned that literacy is based on language, but that it is more than a linguistic concept. She found a corresponding Chinese word for literacy is Su Yang, which she later added to her definition of EAP. She also rationalised concepts such as academic literacy and digital literacy. To Bluewitch, these terms were like a cure for an epidemic disease affecting Chinese students: Chinese university students needed to improve in these areas. So, when, after returning to China, she heard that the Shanghai education bureau was encouraging the teaching of EAP at universities, she attempted to combine her own education ideals with what she had learned in the US to start her own English teaching revolution.

She commenced her EAP journey; however, as I have narrated, Bluewitch encountered an EAP reform in Shanghai. Without any formal training in EAP, she integrated all her experiences in English teaching with her reflections on higher education into her own EAP pedagogy. This was a course directed towards nurturing students’ multiple literacies from the perspective of mentality, culture, vision, academic research and language to enable them to realise their identity as scholars. She also received a large amount of funding from the education ministry to develop her EAP project. With this support, she organised a group of teachers to implement her pedagogy. These teachers, in Bluewitch’s own words, were not taken good care of by the department, as they are unable to pursue their own research or study for doctorates. With the efforts of the EAP team, the teachers were expected to include a module ID for an EAP course in parallel with the original EGP course.

However, her actions caused fear within her department once more, as they claimed that some components of EAP pedagogy, such as critical thinking, are not suitable for the Chinese context. This led them to intervene in Bluewitch’s course, unifying the exams for all the English courses (regardless of whether EAP or EGP) and demanding amalgamation and uniformity of teaching content. This prompted Bluewitch to shift her discussions about EAP onto her WeChat online social media forum, and using media she began sending EAP “MOOC” lessons daily to her students. As a result, the EAP reform in Bluewitch’s university was halted, and some of the teachers in her EAP team left due to the pressure from the department. Although the implementation of the EAP reform at her university ceased, Bluewitch continues to express her educational ideals and her EAP team’s unfair treatment via her online EAP platform.

4.5.2 My Interaction with Bluewitch

Befitting the nature of reflexivity, this section provides a first-person account of the researcher’s relationship with Bluewitch. The first time I learned of Bluewitch was when I was an undergraduate student. I read an English book edited by her, and the book was an important English resource for me. Later after I switched my research interests to EAP, and I found her name on an ESP website. Later in a conversation with another EAP teacher in Shanghai, she mentioned Bluewitch and encouraged me to contact her for in their eyes Bluewitch is a pioneer of the Shanghai EAP reform: “This lady (Bluewitch) is very powerful, when the whole university was not cooperative, she organised the whole EAP curriculum” (the author’s ethnographic fieldnote, November 2015). Remembering her words, I contacted an old friend of mine, who was working as a secretary for the EAP reform in Shanghai, and this old friend told me Bluewitch would be participating in an EAP teacher training session in Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University in Suzhou at the end of November 2015.

This, I attended the conference with the aim of establishing a relationship with Bluewitch. During the conference lunch break, I asked the secretary to introduce me to Bluewitch. The secretary asked the head of the ESP association to build this bridge for me, and the association head told me: “Bluewitch is having a difficult time, because her university is against her” (the author’s ethnographic fieldnote, November 2015). He beckoned a middle-aged lady in a purple down jacket, and that was Bluewitch. “This is professor Bluewitch”, the head introduced us: “and this gentleman is a scholar from Hong Kong, hoping to conduct research on EAP.” I said, “I once read your books and I am an admirer, and I would like to interview you about your EAP course and about your opinions in EAP” (the author’s ethnographic fieldnote, November 2015). So we exchanged our mobile phone numbers and agreed to meet the following week.

I texted messages to her the following Friday, and we fixed a time and place to meet. I called a taxi to a seafood restaurant near her home. As a demonstration of my sincerity, I ordered and paid the bill before she arrived. Bluewitch and I spoke as if we were old friends. She told me she would not be reserved while speaking with me, and we had an in-depth conversation that lasted for nearly three hours. The conversation topics covered her educational background, our respective research interests, her experiences in the US, the situation in Hong Kong, my photography, her understanding of EAP, her English teaching, the challenges she is facing, and even her and her daughter’s future progress. As the interview was in December, she invited me to visit her class and colleagues in the forthcoming spring semester. In her view, my visit would benefit the identity recognition of her EAP team members. I did not use a voice recorder for this interview. As my objective was to make friends and establish a trustworthy relationship with her, I did not want to make our first meeting too purposeful. Therefore, I briefly sketched out some notes recalling the main ideas discussed after the meeting. Bluewitch encouraged me to use WeChat to keep in contact with her and to do follow-up interviews. She invited me into her EAP team members’ WeChat online group, and let me follow her EAP online forum on WeChat.

The meeting with Bluewitch was a great comfort to me at that time, as I was concerned about accessing a sufficient number of research participants, and was not yet quite sure of the research direction. Bluewitch’s trust and willingness to cooperate gave me peace of mind. Her proactive attitude towards me could have been because I was introduced to her by the Secretary and Chair of the ESP association (Bluewitch’s EAP fellows), but it could also have been because, as a scholar from Hong Kong, I afforded her access to EAP projects and information about the difficulties with EAP outside China. Our successful relationship might also have been a consequence of my passion, friendliness and sincerity as an ethnographer, which touched her and made her feel happy to share.

After the initial meeting with Bluewitch, I returned to Hong Kong, and on the train back, the difficult experiences Bluewitch and her team had encountered really struck me. I could sense that they were a unique group of people, whose voices were only partly heard and deliberately neglected. If I could record and reflect their experiences relative to the status quo over a prolonged period of contact, my research might be more natural in context and deliver down-to-earth to data, beyond simply reporting Shanghai EAP teachers’ understanding and implementation of EAP theories gathered through semi-structured interviews or questionnaires.

Arriving in Hong Kong, I organised all the data I had collected in Shanghai. However, the materials I had for the case of Bluewitch did not seem adequate for a three-hour-long discussion. So, as well as observing the interlocutions that took place in the team’s WeChat group (invited by Bluewitch), I also frequently sent questions to Bluewitch through WeChat to support structured interviews. In response, she replied to my answers concerning every detail when she felt able to do so. During these interactions, I clarified her opinions about EAP, and worked to establish how she formulates her ideas.

As scholars in EAP, both of us typically exchange ideas linked to the EAP discipline. Living in mainland China, Bluewith’s EAP resources were less than those I had access to in Hong Kong Whenever I wanted to debate authors and jargon she was unfamiliar with, I would share newly published resources with her. As we became more familiar with each other, we even discussed co-publishing some research papers. As both of us use WeChat, we can also see and like each other’s pictures, so our social media connection served to deepen our friendship.

Bluewitch established several EAP forums through different social media software. These included a forum for EAP teachers at her university, an EAP teacher–student communication group, a critical thinking discussion group for all the Shanghai EAP teachers, and an official EAP WeChat account for accessing EAP lessons. I was lucky enough to be involved in all of these, following all four at Bluewitch’s invitation.

For example, I had access to observe the forum for her EAP team, which is where her teammates communicated about teaching and managerial chores, exchanged ideas and sometimes made complaints. Bluewitch invited me into this group and authorised me to observe their chats, and sometimes I also contributed to their discussion. Over a seven-month period, I kept records of their experiences teaching EAP at the university, their opinions of EAP, and most importantly, I gradually learned about their reality as EAP teachers in Shanghai. Although I did not have daily access to the teachers in person in Shanghai, with the help of the internet and social media, I was able to embark on a virtual ethnography of their real lives. As a member of the EAP teachers’ WeChat group the EAP teachers (including Bluewitch) came to also understand my perspective.

Having been invited by Bluewitch, I also became a member of the critical thinking discussion group for all the Shanghai EAP teachers. The group comprises EAP teachers at different universities in Shanghai, they often negotiate how to teach critical thinking and other EAP skills in their classes, and share teaching resources. I participated in many of the discussions, and the following day, samples of screenshots of our discussions in the group would be selected and pasted to the daily e-lesson on Bluewitch’s official account for her students and the rest of her EAP fans. Thus, my participation, to some extent, contributed to her EAP course structure.

The EAP groups she organised also used social media, and there were two. The former was on QQ (another popular social media), and functioned as a discussion board for her EAP students to reflect on what they had learnt from Bluewitch’s class. I was invited to speak to the students on this platform in the New Year’s holiday, and the content related to EAP and critical thinking is important to these students; moreover, the whole discussion was delivered in English, so I assumed my participation contributed to Bluewitch’s students’ scholarship.

From Bluewitch’s perspective, her official EAP account provides the core demonstration of her EAP ideals, as her university constrains some of her classroom teaching practice. She applies the EAP strategies that cannot be used in her class in the virtual setting. On inviting her students to follow her official account, she sends her EAP lessons daily to the account followers thereby constructing an EAP MOOC of her own. The lessons are arranged into different series; for example, academic vocabulary revision, critical thinking, the world outside China, TED reading and writing etc., and this attracts many of her followers’ attention. Around the Spring Festival of 2016, I became directly involved with her series regarding the World outside China. The goal of this series is to widen the EAP students’ eyes to what is involved in studying abroad to motivate them to work hard to learn EAP and to escape the narrow mindset of studying in China. I wrote about some of my experiences studying in the UK in the series and described my academic visits to other countries. From these interactions, my name became familiar to some of Bluewitch’s colleagues and students.

Before I visited Bluewitch for the second time, she helped me to search for nearby hotels around her university and sent screenshots of places to my mobile phone. However, as I wanted to be jogging every day I could not stay in hotels as I would not be able to leave my computers and cameras unattended. So I did not live in a hotel but a place near a close friend of mine, although this was a little far from Bluewitch’s university.

On a rainy Sunday evening in May, I arranged another meeting with Bluewitch at a tea house close to where she lives. As I was unfamiliar with the place, I went there before she arrived. I found Bluewitch looked more tired than last time. She told me that her daughter had been ill in the United States, so she had been staying in the States and looking after her for almost a month. However, at this time her department in the university chose to break up the EAP team, imposing severe stress on Bluewitch. So, during this discussion, she complained that she could not suffer the attitude of the department anymore.

We started our conversation with an EAP paper I had recently published, and she mentioned how she had studied the concept of literacy when she was in the United States and those associated ideas informed her EAP pedagogy. She also told me the reasons why her department heads are hostile towards her. Later she expressed her concerns for her ill daughter, who had just returned to China on sick leave. Bluewitch told me she would prefer her daughter to go to Hong Kong to complete her postgraduate studies. Sometime later, she invited her daughter to befriend me and call me brother. So, in this way, Bluewitch became like an auntie to me.

Bluewitch organised a party for me and her team of EAP teachers, so that we could get to know one another. The place was at one of the teachers’ homes, and each teacher brought some food they had cooked for the party. I did not bring any food with me, but bought bonsais for each of them. The people were very hospitable, and we already knew each other’s names, since we had been communicating in the WeChat group. We covered topics ranging from students’ demotivation, our respective opinions on EAP, the challenges the EAP team are facing and Bluewitch’s history. This party deepened my understanding of how Bluewitch’s previous experiences allowed her to formulate EAP theories and pedagogy. Similarly, this meeting contextualised my understanding of the challenges Bluewitch is facing.

I was later invited as a guest speaker and academic commentator at a student EAP conference held by Bluewitch. The aim of the conference was to let students disseminate their group’s research results and establish their academic identity as researchers. Students presented their studies in groups via PowerPoint. Before the conference, Bluewitch and I discussed the conference process, and I helped her arrange snacks for tea breaks. I recorded the mistakes and the strengths of each group throughout the entire afternoon of the conference, and gave the students feedback at the end of the activities (Fig. 4.6).

Fig. 4.6
figure 6

A screenshot of some of the topics covered at the conference

Full size image

At this conference, I became a participant just like other students. I witnessed the involvement and contribution of the students, and I observed potential changes in students. Respect touched the bottom of my heart: I realised the achievement and contribution Bluewitch made for students by insisting on teaching EAP, when her “enemies” placed so much pressure on her.

I also observed Bluewitch’s teaching: firstly, as a non-participant observer, and later as a participant-observer. As a non-participant, I found that in her EAP class Bluewitch has to teach CET-4 or CET-6 mock test papers to students rather than EAP. Later I was invited by Bluewitch and another teacher to give a seminar to the students. They asked me to share my experiences of becoming a doctoral researcher as a former university-drop-out. However, I observed most of the students were indifferent to this type of knowledge sharing. They seemed unconcerned with their future careers and the potential relationship between learning English and their future careers, in contrast with those who were proactively involved with the research projects mentioned in previous sections. This indifference reflects Bluewitch’s worries about her students’ low motivation.

4.5.3 The Uniqueness of Bluewitch’s EAP Theory

4.5.3.1 Bluewitch’s EAP Concept

In my first conversation with her, Bluewitch explained how she thought of other teachers’ teach EAP: for example, one of her colleagues, who teaches register to students, holds a doctorate in genre studies, and frequently emphasises discourse analysis and asks students to keep records of all the words they encounter when reading; however, Bluewitch disagrees to the notion of simply teaching English linguistics or socio-linguistics in EAP classes.

Continuing on this topic, Bluewitch shared with me her understanding of EAP. She explained that EAP includes three aspects: scientific mentality (a set of thinking skills, including critical thinking, to do academic research), students’ self-study management (such as note taking), and academic English. This clarifies why she disagrees to simply teaching English discourse analysis to EAP students. Bluewitch also pointed out that the definition of EAP should not be static and should be adjusted to meet the needs of particular students; for example, the EAP needs of postgraduate students are different to those of undergraduates.

After I joined her WeChat official EAP account, I saw a more concrete and holistically defined expression of Bluewitch’s EAP concept (see Fig. 4.7):

Fig. 4.7
figure 7

Bluewitch’s definition of EAP

Full size image

A few days later, I noticed Bluewitch announced the EAP core spirit as in the following screenshot: “Trustworthy, knowledge-seeking, truth-pursuing, willing to share!”

From the moment I saw these concepts, I appreciated the literal meaning of Bluewitch’s EAP approach, but there remained some confusion with regard to the meaning, like a riddle in terms of understanding each aspect of EAP, such as the detail of students’ behaviours, the so-called classroom crisis, and the necessity to develop an EAP spirit. I understood that I was missing the necessary context to perceive fully the logic and reasons underpinning her meaning. When I connected with Bluewitch, the riddles were unveiled, and the development of Bluewitch’s EAP theory became apparent to me (Fig. 4.8).

Fig. 4.8
figure 8

Bluewitch EAP spirit

Full size image

4.5.3.2 The Formation of Bluewitch’s EAP Theory: Deriving from Teaching

In the first interview with her, when I was discussing popular EAP strands around the world, Bluewitch showed some unfamiliarity with them, but she shared with me her own EAP concepts, derived from her practice and reflections upon her teaching experiences. According to Bluewitch, she completed her BA and MA long time ago, her studies had little influence on her understanding of EAP. During my nearly one-year connection with Bluewitch, I came to understand her bumpy career experience, linking it to the formation of her EAP concepts and pedagogy (Table 4.2).

Table 4.2 Bluewitch’s publications in chronological order
Full size table

Reviewing her academic publications, it is not difficult to locate the focus of Bluewitch’s attention when teaching:

From her publications, we can identify several switches of emphasis in Bluewitch’s English teaching; first, from paying attention to vocabulary, to autonomous learning, and then to online learning. After 2013, she started to engage with EAP. Based on the clues I found in her publications, I was curious about what led to her changes in direction, and why she turned to EAP.

4.5.3.3 Recognising Students’ Demotivation Prompting Bluewitch to Search for a Better English Teaching Approach as a Panacea

I recalled that Bluewitch once told me that the transformation in her approach to English language teaching was a process of linking emphasis on education and the EAP reform in Shanghai, which she considers to be consistent with this change: “I have been stressing that the EAP reform is actually a reform helping English language teaching in China universities to become a real act of education from being simply somewhat shallow pedagogy, and EAP itself is education” (Bluewitch interview 3). I then went on to explore the hidden reasons: “what made you keep on changing your interest of teaching?” She replied: “My purpose has always been to improve teaching”. When I asked the question, we were at a party with Bluewitch’s EAP team members, and another EAP teacher’s interjection deepened the conversation: “When did you (Bluewitch) raise the idea of correcting students’ learning behaviour?” (Bluewitch interview 3).

Confirming the Chinese English learners and teachers’ limited language learning awareness, Bluewitch replied:

You know that English teaching in early days of China was teaching vocabulary… because (students and teachers) believed that vocabulary is the bottleneck to learning English… before students entered the universities, they should have finished learning English grammar, so the only obstacle students had when learning English was how to remember as many vocabularies as possible. (Bluewitch interview 3)

Having mentioned the background, Bluewitch recalled her original motivation to improve her teaching practices: “No matter how studious students tried to remember the vocabulary, they forgot it immediately, at very beginning I diagnosed such problems as memory or the cognitive challenges faced by students”. With such puzzles in mind, Bluewitch applied for a visiting scholar position at the psychology department of the East China Normal University, in order to learn how human cognition works. Improving her psychological knowledge, she also started to compose research about her students in English class, although to her surprise, the students were neither interested nor cooperative: “during the experiments, I found the students were not cooperative at all. At that moment I realised that it is not the vocabulary or my teaching methods that matter; no matter what kinds of teaching method I choose, it will not improve their learning as long as they resist it, because they do not want it” (Bluewitch interview 3).

Another teacher commented: “there were several years that your relationship with students was uneasy”. Bluewitch replied: “Yes, yes, yes, when I adopted new methods, they refused to accept them, and they wondered why their English lessons were becoming so difficult” (Bluewitch interview 3).

Reflecting on this experience further, Bluewitch determined that improving students’ cognition is not a means to improve their motivation. Thus, she traced her difficulties back to the critical moment when students were recruited by the universities. She told me: “The biggest challenge our teaching is facing is students learning so as to pass examinations, without examinations they would not learn… they would not learn English until before the exams… learning behaviour correction aims at encouraging them to learn English every day as a hobby” (Bluewitch interview 3).

The first measure Bluewitch adopted to correct students’ learning behaviours was to make use of popular social media online. The earliest form of social media she tried was online forums:

I actually started to use computer-assisted language teaching as early as 2010 to reform my teaching, when there was no EAP in my context; this was called forum-mediated cooperative learning, (besides using computer in class to increase students’ input of English), I used BBS an online forum to engage students’ communication after class (Bluewitch interview 2).

When connecting with her students online, Bluewitch posted English materials to drip-feed her students, and to encourage them to interact with one another. However, she found that until just before exams, students seldom used the forum. She later used Renren, another social media tool specifically designed for university students; however, this tool afforded very limited scope for uploading and sharing English materials. Having witnessed the limitations of Renren in 2012, Bluewitch moved on to using QQ, a software tool that provides a large space for uploading materials for students to share. Today, employing similar theories to guide students’ English language learning, Bluewitch uses WeChat to communicate EAP ideas to students.

4.5.3.4 Experiencing Academic Misconduct and Realising the Significance of EAP

In terms of working as a visiting scholar in East China Normal University, Bluewitch’s original intention was to learn about human cognition and memory; however, the department she was affiliated with tended to emphasise statistics. The supervisor she followed arranged a doctoral student to teach her. Besides learning statistics, Bluewitch was also responsible for translating her supervisors’ research papers into English and getting them published in international journals.

According to Bluewitch, this experience made her realise the possible lack of academic English skills among Chinese scholars, the significance of using academic English, the process of international publication, and how to communicate effectively with journal editors (Bluewitch interview 1). Most importantly, she was disappointed in the academic spirit of some Chinese scholars, resulting in her strong intention to teach academic English and nurture students, as future scholars, and responsible academics:

I asked her, “What suddenly made you have the idea of teaching EAP in university?”

Bluewitch replied:

In 2008, I self-funded as a visiting scholar in East China University learning quantitative methods for two years, during which time I helped to write two research papers written in English: the first paper was written by an undergraduate student in Chinese, I revised it in English and modified it following the journal editors’ suggestions; the second paper was theorised and partially written by me and the data was collected from my students. However, my name only appeared on one of them as the fourth author. Therefore, I cut off the relationship with the supervisor, but this bad experience gave me holistic concepts about academic English, the paper publication process, and communication with editors. The psychology department at the East China Normal University is a pioneering university in China, but the scholars there still have shortcomings in academic English, so by then I had realised the importance of academic English, though I did not know there was a term for it: EAP. (Bluewitch online interview, Dec, 2015)

4.5.3.5 Gaining an International Outlook: The Perfection of Bluewitch’s EAP Theory and Pedagogy

After returning home from the East China Normal University, Bluewitch was bullied by her department heads when applying for a professorship. She was angry and left to become a visiting scholar in the education department at a university in Florida, U.S. During her studies, she found undergraduates in the US began their thesis writing and project work in the first year of study, and she contrasted this with the university students in China who were cramming for exams. Bluewitch thought there was a gap between Chinese university students’ learning styles acquired in high school, and the requirements for academic studies at international universities; because, many Chinese university students were expected to participate in international competitions. When studying in the US, Bluewitch also found university itself overly academic, and noted that students should learn academic skills while enrolled. This awareness later formulated her view of “academic”, as an important component of EAP (English for academic purposes).

In a WeChat post on 31st July 2016, Bluewitch arranged a question–answer session, in which she explained the meaning of “academic”, thus “University is academic”. Similarly, in a post on 10th of September, Bluewitch reminded her students to think about the meaning of university: “Rather than how I should spend the four years at university, I (newlyenrolled university student) should think about what university is, and what does it mean to me. Such a definition (of university) is a core component of her theory. By figuring out what (is meant by university), we come to understand how (to spend our time there).”

Later Bluewitch explained the function of her EAP teaching was to bridge the gap between the university courses in China (which emphasise knowledge accumulation) and university courses internationally (which promote academic research): “The reason we offer EAP reform is to give you a tool to master resources from world renowned institutes; EAP is the bridge for equipping you with an international horizon; you should not be aiming at merely passing CET-4 and 6”. The above quotations were translated from the below screenshot of Bluewitch communicating with her students in an online discussion.

The supervisor Bluewitch learned from was a professor of language and literacy; however, the term “literacy” initially confused Bluewitch, as she could not find corresponding words or phrases in the Chinese dictionary. However, this notion of literacy later bequeathed her an entire pedagogy, helping her to realise her dream of nurturing Chinese students’ academic English and pioneering spirits: “I was wondering: what is literacy? I was searching for meaning and observing his lessons, then I thought literacy might be something based in language but with a meaning above language” (Bluewitch interview 2) (Table 4.3).

Table 4.3 Three-phased evaluation criterion of EAP curriculum literacy. Translated from Bluewitch’s publication in Xth edition 20XX, XX (coded journal name and publication date)
Full size table

After returning to Shanghai, she indeed embedded literacy into her EAP as depicted in the table.

4.5.3.6 Returning to China and Establishing an EAP Utopia

Having had international experience, Bluewitch gradually crystallised her mission back home: bridging the gap for students in China and relative to university education in the world. She then wrote up a research proposal based on her studies in the United States, and applied for a large amount of research funding from the education ministry to support her EAP academic literacy theory and pedagogy building: “I returned to Shanghai in the Summer of 2013, I started to work on my EAP project in 2014, and I created the three pronged (the aforementioned) literacy framework” (Bluewitch interview 2).

Meanwhile, the Shanghai Education Bureau was advocating EAP reform in universities, so Bluewitch went to communicate her idea to the chairperson of the reform: “I went to visit him in October 2014, and he confirmed my theory and pedagogy, and he also absorbed my concept of teaching critical thinking in EAP… he (the chairperson of the reform) had never considered the idea of (critical thinking) until I shared with him my three elements of literacy, of which critical thinking is an important factor” (Bluewitch interview 2). When visiting him, Bluewitch encouraged him to speak for her and promote her notion of academic literacy, and so the chairperson eventually arranged an EAP conference at Bluewitch’s university, inviting scholars across the country: “I used his voice to advocate my theory, and he decided to hold the conference in my workplace, and he said: ‘you can promote your three semester (EAP) course” (Bluewitch interview 2). Since then, Bluewitch’s EAP pedagogy has attracted many colleagues from other universities to learn from her.

4.5.3.7 Involving a War: Calling on EAP to Nurture Students’ Academic Spirit

Bluewitch told me a story about the conflict she experienced within her department, which influenced her formulation of an EAP theory:

I could never foresee that by doing such studies (EAP research) could involve making enemies with everybody. Do you know my situation? Even on the university bus, not a single teacher dared to sit beside me, because they feared they would be noticed by the heads in our department. They did not want to show their friendliness to me… sitting beside me as equals being hostile to the heads. (Bluewitch interview 2)

This saddened her as it reflected the Chinese scholars’ spirits, leading her to feel very disappointed.

Relating to the first interview, Bluewitch’s disappointment was not an exaggeration. Although the department heads knew that EAP was beneficial to students, they forbade Bluewitch to print the title EAP on examination papers, they did not allow Bluewitch and her colleagues to teach their EAP course in the university publicly. The teachers in Bluewitch’s EAP team had to keep their EAP teaching confined to their classrooms. Bluewitch also told me the department stopped her from using her preferred EAP textbook. According to Bluewitch, this was because the department purchased the textbook from a fixed publisher, and if the textbook were changed, the university’s and the publisher’s benefits would be affected.

As mentioned above, in April 2016, Bluewitch visited her sick daughter in the United States. During this time, the department chose to cancel the course and disband the EAP team. Hearing this news, Bluewitch was shocked. She took her daughter back to Shanghai before she had planned to deal with the sudden cancellation of the course. She wrote a letter on WeChat’s official account, calling for attention and assistance from society:

Who can save academic English at University B?

My colleagues and classmates who have long close their eyes on this platform must know some of the reasons why Blue Witch returned to the Motherland with her daughter ahead of schedule: she wanted to deliver a formal communication to the managerial level at the foreign language school of university B regarding the survival of the literacy curriculum for English for Academic Purposes (EAP).

Once in Atlanta, a glimpse of a silver lining cheered her up as the university’s EAP supporters stood up to safeguard their EAP classes, and looking at WeChat, the President left Bluewitch a text message saying ‘I really expect to see you will revive EAP education at university B, and please free to find me if you have any difficulty.’

However, life is so changeable.

Now five days have passed, and despite her demands for a discussion by sending WeChat messages and emails for several times, she has received no responses as yet. Due to the President’s concern, four Deans finally showed up at the school of foreign language for the hearing, but it is regrettable that this failed to change the decision of the school’s top management about cancelling the EAP literacy curriculum.

Ultimately, the undergraduate educational reform curriculum which relies on tasks subsidized by funds for national social science, runs with the financial assistance from the university’s teaching affairs office over three years. How can this decline in such a groundless way?

A spontaneously founded teaching team, which grows positively without concern for returns, is crowned a “so-called team” like this. How can it take control of its destiny?

A professor doesn’t have any power over the academic discourse in his own class. Is this an individual case or prevalent in Chinese higher education?

The Humanity Forum of Polytechnic School of University B is actively organised by students from EAP association. Where does it go?

After two days, Bluewitch will return to her EAP classes. How will she face her students?

Bluewitch, founder of this platform, seeks help for educational reform field of EAP nationwide!

Seeks help from all EAP supporters!

Seeks help from the public media and society overall!

In order to let more people to understand the comings and goings arising from the conflicts, Bluewitch made public a letter she had written to negotiate with the department heads:

Thank you for your concern, Dean Z. Please forgive me if any misunderstanding has occurred in our communication. Here comes my explanation. In light of conflict between the teaching team and managerial level, which may be traced back to March last year, when an EAP teacher’s conference was being prepared, and the foreign language school refused to attend. The President, Mr. Y, in an attempt to coordinate but in vain, finally appointed a publishing house to undertake this activity. And Mr. Z, the head of press and Mr. D, chief editor, as persons involved, all clarified the sense of the whole process. Until 9th May, when we met at university B, President Yu allocated funds and made a speech with the attendance of Mr. B, general secretary. However, in line with the absence of all leadership of school and the presence of 169 teachers nationwide, I promoted the EAP literacy curriculum. Another two statements followed from C, a Professor at Fudan University and N Professor of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU). Meanwhile, two trainers from the University of Leicester were invited to give us presentation. Afterwards, I was criticised for my reckless behaviour of skipping grades, and since then I have been treated by the leaders in senior management as a stranger with no greetings between us. The problem the second time was ignited by an application for an EAP test site. After I made an inquiry to many departments such as Departments of Science and Technology, Teaching Affairs and the Computer Centre, all rendered me support. Regrettably, without the signature of the Assistant Dean of the Foreign Language School, all attendees had to be scattered to their dormitories to finish the examination, and the resultant inaccessibility of the Internet led to student complaints. The third occasion was in the last semester, when none of the EAP teachers were examined for teaching quality by sitting in class with other college English teachers. After that, it was reported that some problems had emerged mainly because teaching contents differed completely from the target. The teachers on our team, under enormous mental pressure, immediately announced they would standardise the test, which led to the consequence that we not only lost independent right to set questions for exams in experimental classes, but they even failed to mark the title of the exam paper as academic. From then on, I sought a face-to-face talk with leaders on the issue of teaching-quality and examination response, while X also wrote E-mails, but we got no response. The fourth point was stirred up by the incident on the department’s website, when a school-level leader made a work report, which hurt us greatly, in which he emphasised the many problems with EAP educational reform, casting doubt on teacher’s qualifications in public. The fifth time relates to the recent news that the top management has decided to cancel the literacy curriculum and change it to an optional course. Members of the EAP association voluntarily protected their courses by sending WeChat messages and going to their classrooms to solicit public support. Many of them felt very agitated by the quarrels that were caused. As EAP had been introduced by the latest policy paper issued by Ministry of Education, universities all over the nation were ready to engage in an experimental reform. University B would have taken the lead had the above events not occurred, and so I sincerely hope that our university may develop its own justified identity to avoid future contradictions and misunderstandings (Translation of Bluewitch’s letter).

After several months’ struggle, in which Bluewitch carefully explained the importance of EAP to the department, it was necessary for the University’s Principal and Registrar to intervene. They agreed to allow a quota of 450 students to study EAP; however, the remaining teachers in the EAP team decided to withdraw and the EAP team was eventually disbanded. The tale was very theatrical, and Bluewitch’s revealed her strengthening suspicion that Chinese scholars’ lack an academic spirit:

The external reason why our team was disbanded was the objection from those in a managerial position, but the internal reason was our member teachers. They did not realise the essence of EAP, they did not have an ontological understanding of EAP. If EAP had become a justified belief, even a self-justified belief, they would not have forsaken their lessons in response to an objection from the departmental heads. (Bluewitch online interview).

The experience of conflicts with the department made Bluewitch aware of the importance of spreading a scholarly spirit among students, future scholars, through their EAP lessons. She was concerned that the teachers, even in her EAP team, lacked the academic values of pursuing truth and rationality. She felt that though they were called scholars, they acted as temperamental intellectuals without an ethical stance. Reflecting on this, she started to blur her understanding of how to define and nurture students’ academic spirit in EAP lessons: “(in order to establish) the identity of scholar, (students have to understand that) scholars are not intellectuals; scholars’ only stance is truth-pursuing and freedom-seeking, but intellectuals have changeable stances (Bluewitch online observation)”. After the breakup of her EAP team and the objections she faced from her university, Bluewitch continued teaching EAP unofficially, calling herself a self-sponsored teacher, and her teaching practice moved to WeChat online, although she taught the course required by the university in her classroom (Fieldnote with Bluewitch, 26 May 2016). Many of her planned EAP activities were organised by the students’ association to avoid attracting criticism from the university.

During this fight, she not only met with colleagues and intellectuals but also scholars and politicians. Under these circumstances, Bluewitch created two sets of concepts for her EAP definition, in other words, establishing a set of long-term goals for her EAP pedagogy: “academic honesty, knowledge-seeking, truth-pursuing, willingness to share”.

In order to offer her students such qualities, she merged her EAP pedagogy with the aforementioned core spirits and announced her course aimed at nurturing students’ academic identity as scholars. Bluewitch believed that only by having an identity as scholars, could students gather sufficient motivation to learn EAP; Bluewitch emphasised that every component of her EAP lessons revolved around establishing a scholarly identity:

Bluewitch:

I just feel establishing a scholarly identity among students is the everlasting mission of EAP teaching; if they (students) consider themselves as scholars and are proud of such an identity, my EAP teaching is successful. Because the more students learn language or words, the quicker they forget; but an established identity is permanent, they may be motivated to learn later on. (Bluewitch interview 3)

4.5.3.8 Winning Opportunities for University-Enterprise Cooperation: The Spring of EAP

Engulfed in the above situation, and engaged in a persistent struggle, it was not until the end of 2016 that Bluewitch was able to send me a piece of good news. She informed me that the university Chancellor gave her EAP club the opportunity to bid for a long-term translation project organised by the Chinese Academy of Engineering. After some effort, they won the bid: “the Chancellor earmarked funding for our club, and gave us the translation task from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, he also helped us establish a place for EAP student interns, named ‘Daoqi EAPC technological translation group’” (Bluewitch online interview, August 2016).

For Bluewitch, this activity revived her EAP course; moreover, it symbolised the recognition of the university: “such establishment of EAP internship places equal recognition from the university regardless of the obstacles put in place by my department”. Therefore, the Daoqi EAPC translation group, led by Bluewitch, quickly advocated activities of different kinds, engaging the students in devoting time to academic translation after completing the EAP course. Bluewitch’s EAP course was finally on its way to establishing EAP students’ identities as scholars in real disciplines.

4.5.3.9 EAP: An Act of Changing from Pedagogy to Education

As concluded by Bluewitch, her EAP trial symbolised switching from simply pedagogy to education, as demonstrated in the screenshot below of a post from Bluewitch’s EAP official account:

We cannot change the title of course, because it will directly influence the establishment of students’ scholarly identity, when people have identity, they will have a sense of belonging, and then a motivation and passion to study. Our course is an attempt from a pedagogical perspective to support education; we should expand every effort to encourage the literacy of “sincerity, knowledge-seeking, truth-pursuing, and willingness to share (Bluewitch online observation).

EAP theory and Bluewitch’s pedagogy did not diverge from her original intention to improve students’ motivation to learn English: “you (students) are scholars, you should study like this (EAP), then you (students) may realise the reason; it is not the teachers that ask us to learn; it is your identity” (Bluewitch interview 3).

4.5.4 What Does Bluewitch Think About the EAP Reform and the EAP Courses Offered at Other Similar Universities?

During all my interviews and casual chats with Bluewitch, we inevitably covered EAP in China and how teachers teach EAP in universities other than Bluewitch’s. Bluewitch reported that “EAP scholars in China had not made clear the meaning of EAP before they engaged in the fighting (over whether EAP should be taught across universities)” (Bluewitch interview 3). Bluewitch also admitted that EAP pedagogy is only a more fundamental form of EAP, “if EAP teaching is actually responsible for nurturing students’ research capabilities, only disciplinary teachers teaching students in the same discipline can provide the utmost efficiency; but our EAP course is more fundamental… our students are either in their first year or second year at university” (Bluewitch interview 3).

When I mentioned Fielding and his colleagues, we required that business major students to complete research project and design questionnaires, Bluewitch replied: “our students are in the majors of polytechnic, is it applicable for them to design questionnaires… it is not realistic” (Bluewitch interview 2). Furthermore, in the first interview, Bluewitch demonstrated her preferences in EAP teaching; i.e. making EAP not only an English language course. She also used to have a teaching partner who preferred teaching genre studies to EAP students, and her partner often asked students to complete discourse analyses and remember all the words they encountered. However, Bluewitch added many digital literacy components to her EAP courses, and ultimately the differences ended this partnership.

4.5.5 The Features of Bluewitch’s EAP Course

Just as Bluewitch told me, when confined by the department policies, her idealised EAP pedagogy could not be applied in the classroom. As was reflected in my observation, Bluewitch had to teach CET-6 mock test papers, while teaching EAP informally via WeChat. The EAP activities Bluewitch organised, were resisted by the department. For example, after I visited the university as a scholar from Hong Kong, Bluewitch was criticised by the department for inviting scholars from overseas without permission from the university. Thus, Bluewitch had to stop organising EAP activities herself, and so she established an EAP student association so the student members of the association could organise activities proposed by Bluewitch.

Generally speaking, Bluewitch adopted a mixed learning mode teaching EAP, and she effectively used resources inside and outside the class. As I stated previously, she used WeChat flexibly, as an approach to diffusing EAP knowledge, and the course she devised includes a variety of themes; for example, critical thinking training, academic vocabulary revision, knowledge of the world outside, EAP pilot class summer school, Daoqi EAPC news and student communications. Bluewitch successfully utilised campus resources such as the Daoqi EAPC to organise academic conferences and English competitions to encourage students to get more involved into academic output. Similarly, Bluewitch also proactively imported social resources, such as inviting scholars (myself included) to communicate with students regarding the importance of EAP and students’ studies at the university. Most importantly, she let students participate in academic translation projects related to their disciplines.

4.6 Case Study 4: Rui

4.6.1 Life History of Rui

Born in Henan province, Rui is a loving person highly engaged in reading and thinking. She had studied extremely hard due to fierce competition for National College Examinations. During the examination preparation period, she rose at around five o’clock every morning to recite short articles printed on English test papers. She was admitted to Shanghai International Studies University to study advertising, minoring in English. During her undergraduate studies, she kept reading English literature, ranging from prose to Russell’s book. Generally speaking, Rui concludes that she prefers to read thought-provoking literature. Even today, she uses Russell’s work to teach EAP. Due to her background in advertising, she did not write theses in English as an undergraduate, so she later studied an MA in cognitive linguistics. Rui became quickly accustomed to writing academic theses in English, and Rui explained that her quick adaptation to this was partially due to learning from Russell’s work and other researchers’ literature in the field of cognitive linguistics. Her MA dissertation did not involve conducting any empirical studies.

After graduation, Rui was recruited to the university where she now works. Rui said to me: “after graduation, my interests returned to English literature, if I ever do my doctorate, I will be researching comparative literature” (Rui interview 3). Based on her knowledge of English literature, Rui formulated a set of EAP teaching methodologies to provoke students’ critical thinking in reference to literature. For example, she sometimes uses sentences by Confucius or Taoist to start an EAP class, she also uses Socratic questioning to encourage students’ in-depth thinking and debate. After some EAP teaching demonstration, Rui’s EAP teaching was admired and praised by her colleagues across Shanghai, and she was awarded first prize for EAP teaching by the Shanghai education bureau after her demonstration.

As well as teaching EAP by referring to classic literature, Rui also uses emotional teaching methods in her EAP classes. She quotes “the essence of education is a soul waking up another” (Rui interview 3). She also likes to spend time tutoring each of her EAP students face-to-face, despite the fact that this takes up her personal time, because she believes it not only enhances students’ learning effectiveness, but also increases the teacher–student emotional connection and cooperation. She has also been awarded an EAP teaching excellence award by the Shanghai education bureau.

4.6.2 My Two Years of Contact with Rui

Befitting the nature of reflexivity, this section provides a first-person account of the researcher’s relationship with Rui. In 2014, I got to know Rui through a roommate at Edinburgh University, as they were both colleagues and friends. Before I met Rui, I had heard from my roommate that she was a poetic and versatile teacher, who worked extremely hard. After her university had commenced the EAP reform, she was appointed as the star EAP lecture, with the result that her work pressure doubled squeezing her sleeping time, while all her salary and welfare remained unimproved. Aware of her stress, I was, on the one hand, curious about her stance in relation to the EAP reform, but on the other concerned about whether Rui would be happy to be my research participant. After my roommate’s proactive recommendation, I finally met Rui and her husband in a restaurant close to her house; I prepared a gift in advance expressing my thanks. After some time spent waiting, Rui arrived, dressed in a simple down jacket, with a tinge of fatigue on her face. Rui was polite and nervous, acting in a guarded way, particularly when answering my questions. Even though I convinced her that the information she provided to me would only be used for my own research, and would not be revealed to any other teacher in Shanghai. When I attempted to join her WeChat after the interview, she refused me saying she only used WeChat for her family. Before our second meeting, three months later, she occasionally sent me some files, and I sent her festival greetings whenever possible in order to win her trust.

The second meeting was during the Spring festival of 2015, when I took the train to Shanghai to specially to meet with her, and prepared some questions. With my roommate and his wife for company, we chose a Starbucks for the interview. Rui was reserved in terms of sharing her opinions when answering my questions about the Shanghai EAP reform, but when I asked about her classroom activities and personal history, she did not show any reluctance to speak. The third meeting was held in November 2015, and after such a long time connection, Rui and I had become friends to some extent, and she had become accustomed to me, and trusted that my research would not impact negatively on her. Although I also invited my roommate to participate in our meetings, I felt Rui did not bottle up her real feelings about the situation, and she shared with us a lot of her experiences in class and her opinions about EAP. After the meeting, she gave me some contact details of her students, allowing me to interview them. At this time, I asked her if I could also observe her teaching, and she agreed. However, after that meeting, when I returned to Hong Kong to prepare for my thesis examination I heard that she was pregnant and had started her maternity leave, so unfortunately, I did not have an opportunity to observe her class. However, Rui did send me some portions of her teaching diary for reference purposes.

4.6.3 Rui’s Understanding of EAP

In the third interview, after hearing so much about Rui’s EAP teaching techniques, I encouraged her to share her opinions about EAP, and she suggested two aspects: thinking and academic expression. She claimed, “when teaching EAP, I believe the most important issue is to teach a kind of thinking”; another aspect she mentioned was that “simultaneous, academic expression has to be equally stressed, because students are not doing well in this aspect” (Rui interview 3). She gave an example of the integration of the both aspects in an EAP class: “in each chapter, after I teach them the vocabulary they need to remember (as input), I would then integrate thinking training, when they started to think and discuss, I would tell them how to express themselves more academically, and how to avoid informal expressions” (Rui interview 3).

4.6.4 The Difference Between EGP and EAP

For Rui, the primary difference is the emphasis between the two. EGP concerns vocabulary and grammar: “Let me share some of my feeling towards EAP and EGP, like my own teachers, in the first year of my teaching (EGP), I spent much time teaching language, sometimes a little about culture, but I could never teach beyond them, I did not encourage my students to develop their thinking (like I do in EAP class)” (Rui interview 3). However, “in EAP lessons, I started to engage in a somewhat big change: I let students participate classroom discussion, enlightened them to think from different angles… another issue is to broaden their horizons or raise their awareness that there exist different opinions on different issues” (Rui interview 2).

4.6.5 Rui’s Opinion on Shanghai EAP Reform

To Rui whether this reform will be successful depends on the proviso that “a good EAP (curriculum) should satisfy students’ needs” (Rui interview 2). Without this, Rui explains, students’ motivation might be overlooked, resulting in problems carrying out effective EAP teaching. Having mentioned this, Rui then gave me an example of a counterpart university that has conducted an EAP reform: “the flipped EAP class in **university is not catering for the demotivated Chinese students… their expected outcomes might not be reached. Without ensuring the capability of students, EAP teaching cannot be guaranteed” (Rui interview 2). “I know that this reform was to improve students’ ability to carry out academic research…just like the example he (the policy-maker) often raised of a student named Liu Lu… Liu Lu was good at mathematics even world class, but just due to her weakness in academic English, she could not spread her ideas around the world…” (Rui interview 2). Rui disputed the assertion that policy maker’s intention to use EAP to replace EGP would benefit most students; rather she believed it was originally directed at an elite group: “what would be the proportion of Liu Lu-like students in the whole population? He should have made the position clearer” (Rui interview 2). Rui also unveiled a problematic issue concerning training students’ academic thinking:

[Y]ou want the students to have a somewhat in-depth thinking capability, which could be attained only by large amount of reading, but our students are busy studying their disciplines, even if I recommend them English books to read, they do not have time… My conundrum is that my students are so busy, I noticed that their timetable is packed… they won’t spend time on English after class, when there are only 4-6-hour English lessons per week… they lack the drive and motivation to do extracurricular reading, nor do they have enough time. (Rui interview 2)

Rui also criticised the Shanghai EAP reform as over reliant on teaching skills: “this reform is… prone to nurture students’ skills”. Rui expressed anxiety that such a skill-based tendency is contrary to the humanistic nature of education:

He (the policy maker) was positive that the EAP reform was practical… He never mentioned how the humanity of students could be improved by learning such a course…he particularly published an essay claiming if university English courses only pay attention to humanity they are failing… I personally prefer a combination of both (skill and humanity). (Rui interview 3)

As a participant teacher involved in the EAP reform, Rui complained the reform was so sudden that teachers were uncertain about what and how to teach in EAP: “He (the policy maker) is also aware that the teachers are not ready, so he organised many EAP teacher training activities, like the teaching demonstration last year… however, what is your (policy maker) purpose?” Hearing that I pondered this for a few seconds, realising that the training Rui mentioned did not make her EAP teaching concept clear, and in order to test my hypothesis, I asked: “you did not learn a specific method from him, did you?” “Yes”, she said: “we learned from each other (by demonstrating teaching), but what would be the next step we should take?” (Rui interview 3).

4.6.6 Using the Classics to Enlighten Students’ Thinking

Socratic questioning is one of the methods Rui often uses to develop her student’s critical thinking. In the first interview, Rui told me how she implemented this method: in a class, she asks students to study a passage about lifelong learning; as a warm-up, she keeps asking questions to challenge her students’ opinions until the students are convinced (the author’s reflection of Rui’s first interview). Apart from Socrates’ questions, Rui intends to choose philosophers’ work, such as Russell’s, for the following reasons: “1. He (Russell) is a literate, his words are trustworthy, easy-to-follow and with beauty; 2. He is also a mathematician with strong logic, which could help teaching students to think critically; 3. He is also a philosopher, who can develop thinking and discussions over a sentence or an issue” (Rui interview 3).

4.6.7 Using Emotion to Teach

Rui’s colleagues commented that she is a teacher who uses emotion to teach. It is a very high complement, Rui thought such a comment is applicable to her, because she normally spends time giving individual feedback to every student: “after I assign them topics to prepare as homework, I tell them how to write in general, and when they’ve finished writing, I would ask them to visit my office and give them one-to-one feedback” (Rui interview 3). Rui reflected that such tutoring encouraged students to develop a deeper understanding of the questions, and more importantly, according to Rui, this method “could build an intimate teacher-student relationship, with such an emotional connection, that even the classroom activities are boring, they will still cooperate” (Rui interview 3).

4.6.8 The Influence of Rui’s Background on Her EAP Teaching

Rui’s background has a strong impact on her EAP teaching, the most obvious factor is her reading practices, which have helped her to formulate many of her teaching concepts, just as when she made the comment: “I still keep the habit of reading, I particularly like reading thought provoking articles… I remember a professor once said that English major students were prone to be short of thinking, so I can deal with such a lack” (Rui interview 3).

4.7 Summary

This chapter found that each teacher experience investigated led to a different journey of pedagogic transition. Fielding was interested in English, and later in international higher education, became a believer in learning by doing. After years of EGP teaching, he accumulated a wealth of observational data about his students and abundant teaching experiences. When working as an EAP course coordinator, he adopted a project-based EAP pedagogy. Lisa, when majoring in philosophy, and later in applied linguistics, found herself unable to publish in international academic journals while studying in the UK; however, after learning the genre and register she made progress. Based on this experience, she returned to teach EAP and during the process, she found her EAP course lacked humanity. Bluewitch was dedicated to improving teaching efficiency, and she sought different methods to do so but all ended up in vain. After she studied at a US university and experienced conflicts with her colleagues, she found the lack of a scholarly identity made her students demotivated and her colleagues irresponsible. Therefore, she designed an EAP course, aiming to establish her students’ scholarly identities, based on literacy concepts learned in the US. However, her EAP course and associated team members were oppressed by her university, and after years of fighting, she created a course online and used many social resources to support it. Rui was very interested in reading literature and philosophy, and used classic texts to enlighten students’ critical thinking and tried to establish good relationships with her students. By familiarizing myself with these four teachers, I had an absolutely new vision of CETs and their pedagogical transition to EAP. The original description of CETs in the literature review and CETs’ reluctant ability to teaching EAP I used to hold was to a large extent modified. The next chapter aims to report and analyse the modified interpretation of the CETs transiting to EAP teaching, and the discussion would revolve around three themes by answering three research questions.