Abstract
English language teacher identity is complex, multifaceted, and socio-politically oriented, and inevitably influenced by neoliberalism, which is transforming societies systemically. Neoliberalism, variously defined, can be seen as an economic agenda, a standpoint of ideology, and a type of governmentality. The neoliberal transformation in English education has resulted in a growing range of English standardized tests and an increasing number of English learners turning to private tutoring to maximize their test scores. In the neoliberal educational context of China, one popular private English test product is the International English Language Test System (IELTS) tutorials, where tutors teach to the IELTS test, preparing tutees to pass the international standardized English test for overseas secondary and tertiary education. The power relations in private IELTS tutoring, particularly in large institutions, are different from private supplementary tutoring (shadow education) of English. This is because English shadow education is exam-oriented helping tutees to achieve better scores in domestic English tests in formal schools, whereas private IELTS tutoring introduces the international language test and its global governing bodies into the power relations. The IELTS test with the changed stakeholders in the power relations can cause deviations from English shadow education in IELTS tutor recruitments, tutoring work practice, and tutor administration and thus unique IELTS tutor identity formation. This thesis investigated the identities of private IELTS tutors in terms of their positioning in a leading tutoring institution in China.
This thesis used a poststructural approach drawing on Foucauldian discourse, power-knowledge, and disciplinary power techniques and instruments combined with Bourdieuian symbolic power concepts of capital, field, and habitus to explore the identity of the private IELTS tutors in a large institution. Five IELTS tutors (one man, four women) with three to twelve years of experience in a large private institution in China agreed to participate. I conducted three-round of interviews over the course of eight months. The interviews were conducted in Mandarin. The Mandarin transcripts were analyzed using both deductive and inductive discourse analysis to investigate the wide range of positions the tutors took before being translated into English.
My analysis demonstrated the negotiations between the institution and the tutors’ agency and both the parties’ utilitarian orientations of each other resulting in a wide range of tutor positions. By dominating the IELTS tutoring labor market through its strong economic advantage and reputation, the institution set up strict employment requirement for top qualified tutors as potential employees. The tutors adopted teaching practices as required by the institution, when it attempted to shape tutees’ purchasing behaviors and increase business profits for the institution. The institution also shaped a tutoring working culture to trap tutors in peer competition to avoid them leaving the institution and becoming potential business competitors. This peer competition, where tutors raced to acquire new competencies, served to further benefit the institution for innovative and quality tutoring. Meanwhile, tutors were shaped as docile employees in their institutional professional development path, and the path with successive professional developmental stages entitling higher tutoring titles to tutors drove loyalty from some of them. However, while tutors were achieving the higher titles, they were also disciplined to provide other values for the institution for example, doing marketing to facilitate sales.
These findings of my thesis built on the literature in private supplementary tutoring of English (English shadow education) and English tutor identity by providing insights into an extended and under-researched field of identity of private IELTS tutors. The thesis illustrated detailed power relations in this field and identity formation influenced by both structural norms and agency. The thesis also unpacked the negotiation between the neoliberal institutional IELTS tutoring working culture in a leading private institution and its tutors’ resistance. Two models of irreplaceability were theorized to depict the neoliberal working norm and how the concept guided individual tutor’s behavior to react to the structural norm shaping identities. The insights can be useful for policymakers and educational theorists as the study explored the neoliberal effect on an under-researched group of institutional English educators in the private sector and how the newly unveiled complex power relations shaped educationists’ identity and practice in a large private institution.