Co-teachers’ perceptions of collaborative EFL teaching: a case study in Taiwan

Abstract

Co-teaching studies of native English speaking teachers (NESTs) and local English teachers (LETs) have identified numerous factors debilitative to professional collaboration. The aim of this case study is to identify factors facilitative to co-teaching that may lead to more productive avenues of change than continual re-identification of co-teaching problems. A grounded theoretical approach is used to review document and interview data from one NEST-LET pair teaching English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) to young learners in Taiwan. Themes derived from grounded theoretical analysis are then re-categorized according to the framework of social interdependence theory (Johnson & Johnson in JAMA 38:365–379, 2009) to describe how the co-teachers established a positive co-teaching relationship. This study found that the participants’ situated perspectives of co-teaching were more similar than dissimilar, with several identical themes present in both participants’ data. Application of social interdependence theory found negative outcomes in the minority and indications of positive or promotive interdependence in the majority. Although the co-teachers described negative affect and tensions, these phenomena were attributed to external factors or directed at agents outside the partnership. The findings herein suggest that variables pertaining to interpersonal sensitivity can be more critical to co-teaching success than the teaching qualifications of the NEST partner.