Inspiring English teachers: a comparative study of learner perceptions of inspirational teaching

This is the first of two reports on a project that tried to find examples of inspiring English teaching in the state school systems of Guangzhou, China and Jakarta, Indonesia. The project’s rationale was to expand our understanding of what makes language teaching motivating, especially what inspires long-term individual effort to learn the language in developing country contexts where official provision is limited in terms of time, resources and quality assurance. In this report we focus on the responses to an online survey that asked learners to nominate a teacher they had had in school who had inspired them, to describe their teaching and to tell us what it had inspired them to do. Some 279 valid responses were obtained, and 163 different teachers were nominated, some of them many times by different learners. The inspiring teachers were said by learners to have a range of different qualities, with personal and professional virtues proving just as important as methodological competence or innovation. Some intriguing differences were found in the preferences of Chinese and Indonesian learners. Although inspiring teaching may be quite rare, it can have long-term effects on learners, generating interest, a sense of progress, and a desire to invest more effort into learning outside the classroom. These benefits may be mutually reinforcing. Overall, the study reinforces the notion that teachers can play a pivotal role in inspiring young people to study but also warns against simplistic contextuniversal prescriptions for how it should be done.