The Shaping of Chinese Primary School YuWen Teachers: Teachers’ Conceptions of YuWen, Narratives of School Environment and Upbringings

YuWen, mainland China’s official first language curriculum, occupies the highest proportion (20–22%) of all compulsory education lessons. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence to show what YuWen means to YuWen teachers. This thesis responds to this gap and asks: how do different Chinese primary school YuWen teachers understand YuWen, and how are individual YuWen teachers’ subjectivities constituted through their narratives about YuWen? An overarching phenomenological stance provides this research with a conceptual and analytical framework for interpreting teachers’ subjective shaping of YuWen. Specifically, phenomenography is used to reveal the structural features of a group of YuWen teachers’ consciousness by exploring their conceptualisations of YuWen through collective experiences, and phenomenological narrative theory examines the ways in which teachers’ narratives construct their identities. From 2021 to 2023, three rounds of interviews were conducted. The more phenomenographic informed semi-structured interview questions were used mainly in round 1, and the more narrative approach and biographic questions were used in the following interviews, but the division was not clear-cut. Twenty-one Chinese primary school YuWen teachers from various locations with different lengths of teaching experience, degrees, disciplinary backgrounds and genders were involved in Round 1. Thirteen teachers of those teachers also participated in Round 2, and four teachers were interviewed again in Round 3. Analysis of the interviews revealed four conceptions of YuWen and how teachers’ narrative constructions of school environments and growing experiences intersected with their conceptions of YuWen. Phenomenographic findings highlighted a non-dualistic perspective in seeing an inseparable relationship between subjective experiences and the objective world, and indicated that teachers’ subjectification can make a difference to the four conceptions of YuWen they held. Their narratives around school environment, upbringing, and authority constructed their subjectivity as YuWen teachers. This thesis brings practitioners’ subjective constructions to the field of YuWen and provides a non-dualistic perspective on language education and teacher education research.