A Case Study On Social Interaction And Knowledge Construction In A Teachers’ Virtual Learning Community

The profound influence of social constructivism and the advance of modern information technologylead to the emergence of the teacher professional community under the network environment, whichspeeds up the implementation of teachers’ professionalization and satisfies the request of the ongoingeducation reform and teacher education. It provides an ideal platform for teacher professionaldevelopment, and enables teachers’ professional learning and teaching practice, individual learning andgroup learning to integrate into each other. Thus, the integration of teachers’ professional developmentwith network technologies has become an inevitable trend.The present study examines the professional growth of three Chinese grassroots English teachers byanalyzing their online discourse and social interaction in6-year-long regular CMC-based discussions. Thethree case teachers in this study, who were at different stages of their professional development, regularlyparticipated online thematic discussions between2006and2012. By investigating their interactionalpatterns in their online social network and collaborative conversations in the discussions with teachereducators and other peer teachers in the online community, the present study attempts to explore how theaffordance of opportunities of real-time, online, work-embedded and computer-mediated communicationnurtures the professional growth of the primary and secondary EFL teachers in Chinese context.It is found in this study that CMC-based VLCs created new opportunities for grassroots teachers tointeract personally, socially and professionally with other fellow teachers otherwise inaccessible in theirphysical community. At the initial stage of online communication, the newcomers were more likely to relyon vertical relations, preferring to interact with people with more expertise or power in the community.New horizontal, peer-to-peer relationships were established with their increasing involvement in theactivities in the online community of practice. Socio-affective strategies were frequently used by theparticipants, especially by the peripheral members with a strong desire to communicate with the coremembers of the community. The teachers at their earlier stage of professional development posted moremessages coded as generating and elucidating, while the teachers at their later professional stage postedmore messages codes as integrating and resolution. The first two phases（generating and elucidating）related to generating some real-life problems can be conveniently subsumed into one larger category ofinternalizing while the participants transform explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge by internalized inthe phases integrating resolution. It was in the dynamic and spiral cycle of internalizing and externalizing phases that individual teachers sought solutions to their practical problems, and at the same time engagedthemselves in meaningful negotiations and co-constructed knowledge base with other participants in thevirtual community of inquiry, and thus created new opportunities for their professional development. Inthe end, the author pointed out the limitations of this research and suggestions for further research.