Research in the field of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) education has been increasing in the last decades. The number of people learning the Chinese language and its culture is growing. At present time, according to incomplete statistics from the Chinese Embassy in Berlin, there are, in Germany, more than 300 elementary schools, comprehensive schools and Gymnasiums that offer Chinese language courses (Hanban, 2023). This means that there has been a considerable increase in the number of Germans who begin to learn the Chinese language; but an urgent problem is the lack of professional Chinese teachers with strong intercultural competences and professional skills (Guder, 2022). In the context of globalization in education, teachers’ mobility has been increased, especially in the field of foreign language teaching and learning (Wang et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2024). Therefore, language teachers should be required to adjust to foreign educational contexts that differ from their educational biographies. Professional beliefs and perceptions of their identity are shaped by their cultural and educational background, as well as their teaching experiences in an intercultural context (Borg, 2003; Liu, Mearns & Admiraal, 2024). However, CFL teachers’ professional conceptions and beliefs constructed through traditional Chinese pedagogy may experience new problems in the new environment.

Developmental tasks within the framework of Bildungsgang (learner development and educational experience)   

As I have noted above, Bildung-centered Didaktik has been influencing learning and teaching in the past and at present. Studying the framework of Bildungsgang didactics² (learner development and educational experience) allows providing a new theoretical framework on the interplay of students and teachers. I start with the concept of Bildungsgang that focuses on the process of Bildung. However, the German compound Bildungsgang means more than “educational process” (M. Meyer, 2007), and combines education and teaching with higher-level educational aims. Bildungsgang research thus focuses on four central research concepts, namely educational experience, developmental tasks, sense construction and individual didactics. It means that, within the teacher-student interaction, students bring with them their biographical baggage, their former experiences, their individual beliefs and their expectations. In addition, the same holds for teachers, they cope with different challenges and problems concerning objective social requirements (i.e. developmental tasks). Combing research on teachers’ professional development and their individual perceptions in my study, I focus on the learners’ self-regulation development and sense construction on the one side and the teachers’ professional developmental tasks as they can be related to their biographical educational experience on the other side.

The Bildungsgang framework can thus provide a new perspective to study Chinese teachers’ teaching and their professional development. Intercultural tensions and conflicts led to different challenges for the Chinese teachers’ professional transition into the German educational context. In the following section on the six Chinese teachers of Chinese as a foreign language, I mainly examine the influence of these teachers’ prior experience and professional beliefs on their present professional behavior. In addition, I study whether the Chinese teachers are able to successfully deal with professional tasks and to conduct sense constructions in class, and I integrate the students’ developmental tasks.

Research questions

Concerning these teachers’ professional adaptations to the German situation and the transformations produced by that, my intercultural study aims to answer two principal research questions:

(1) On the basis of case studies in Germany, I ask how the six Chinese language teachers of my study adapt to their new educational situation in Germany and what kind of transformation their professional beliefs underwent. 

(2) Secondly, I try to identify some professional developmental tasks for the Chinese language teachers and I ask how they cope with the professional tasks in their biographical experience.

Methodology An ethnographic approach was chosen because it allows studying people in the naturally occurring setting or ‘fields’ by means of methods which capture their social meanings and ordinary activities. It allows collect data in a systematic manner but without meaning being imposed on them externally onto the research objects (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995; Fetterman, 1998; Brewer, 2000: 10). I did a larger number of classroom observations and wrote field notes. The approach of participant observation can help me to generate qualitative data, which provides an “insider” view and prevent misinterpretation of the observed behavior. Writing field notes was part of the observations made to describe some specific classroom situations, to show momentary interaction of students and teachers and to record my reflections concerning the classroom activities (Lu, 2013: 84). Classroom observation and field notes in this way can be used to describe these teachers’ professional experience and the professional transformations produced by them. Teacher participants The six Chinese language teachers in my project work in two different schools. The two schools have been chosen for convenience. On the one hand, the two famous German schools have been offering Chinese language teaching for many years. On the other hand, since I am personally acquainted with these Chinese teachers, it was comparatively easy to carry out the interviews. Ms. J, Ms. B and Ms. W teach at an emerging private comprehensive school (including an elementary school and a gymnasium). The second school is a gymnasium, has been offering Chinese since 2003. Ms. T, Ms. C and Ms. L teach at the school. Chinese has for a long time been accepted as a second foreign language and is included in the Abitur, the final examination. The names of my case studies are anonymous. All six language teachers are female, but the sampling is not purposely selective. It reflects that female Chinese teachers dominate German schools. From May 2022 to December 2022, I had conducted two rounds of semi-structured and in-depth teachers’ interviews with the teachers on their professional development and professional beliefs. The interviews lasted about 30 minutes and were audio recorded and transcribed. The interviews were conducted in Chinese as a convenience for the teachers in order to help them to better express individual professional outlooks and perceptions. Interview transcripts were transcribed and translated from Chinese into English for my forthcoming analysis.

My case studies allow to identify the Chinese teachers’ developmental barriers and tasks and their achievements. If teachers of Chinese from mainland China or with a Chinese background have been educated under the core beliefs of such a traditional scheme as it is exemplified in the Chinese tradition; they may retain and activate this traditional cultural knowledge in their approaches to Chinese as a foreign language in overseas contexts (Moloney and Xu, 2012, p. 473). Therefore, teachers’ professional beliefs can come into conflict with the schemata and expectations of the local curricula and pedagogies. The Chinese teachers stick to their professional beliefs and perceptions, and I thus find to a number of developmental barriers producing constraints as already proposed above. The teachers have to realize that there is a conflict of: (a) Competence: teacher-centered didactics versus student-centered didactics, (b) Mediation: traditional Chinese teaching strategies versus intercultural communicative didactics, (c) Acknowledgment: strict classroom discipline versus acknowledgement of the “otherness” of the students, (d) Institution: regular collegial communication versus insufficient professional training and inefficient collegial cooperation within the institution. The Chinese teachers of Chinese as a foreign language should transform their own previous beliefs in a new foreign context and cope with their unexpected developmental tasks. By this they can gradually construct their own individual didactics. But the future professional training of these teachers needs to be grounded in more empirical research in other European countries and regions which allows other educational researchers to identify intercultural conflicts and challenges in the individual educational context. I can assume that my study provides information on the further development of Chinese teachers’ professionalization process within the European educational settings.

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