95 / 2021-06-26 17:44:48

Retrospective Exploration on the Development of EAP Writing Teachers’ Adaptive Expertise

CDST, Teacher adaptitve expertise, EAP writing

Adaptive expertise (AE) has been advocated as a changing and systematic ability that competent and proficient teachers should possess in getting accustomed to dynamic teaching contexts. Teachers with adaptive expertise hold the tendency to modify the already-mastered skills and invent new procedures (Goodnow et al., 2007), enrich and refine their knowledge (Crawford, 2007; Holyoak, 1991), to meet newly-encountered challenges. Some researchers have examined the components of AE by reviewing relevant literatures(e.g., Carbonell et al., 2014) and some have focused on teacher adaptations (e.g., Corno, 2008; Loughland, 2019). However, few have explored to what degree and how AE inform teachers’ adaptive teaching, particularly the developing and changing teaching contexts in academic English (EAP) writing classes.



Adopting a complex dynamic systems theory (CDST) perspective, this study has explored the development of five EAP writing teachers’ (from different universities in China) adaptive expertise in and out of classrooms through questionnaire, classroom observations and retrospective interviews from 2018 to 2020. Findings of the current work revealed that Chinese EAP writing teachers experienced a dynamic developing trajectory in adoption of different teaching approaches, demonstrated complex psychological features in the process of delivering EAP writing knowledge. These results reflected and confirmed the adaptive features of teacher expertise in the tertiary EAP writing contexts. Implications for practitioners and researchers were also discussed in the present work.