Performance of Mediation and Situational Constraints of China ’ s Secondary School EFL Teachers

This paper concerns China’s secondary school EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teachers’ implementation of mediation to explore why there are so few mediative classrooms and what can be done to make language classrooms more mediative. The questionnaire survey is employed for the data collection in terms of teachers’ mediative practices and constraints. From the data gathered in a questionnaire survey of 152 secondary school EFL teachers, the findings indicate that most EFL teachers are in no position to mediate students’ learning due to situational constraints that they encounter. Most of the teacher participants view the lack of advice from relevant experts and of training on implementing the mediator as the most influential of all the constraints. As such, the paper tries to reveal reflective implications and positive demonstrations for EFL teacher practitioners by providing some reference evidence for policy makers, curriculum developers, and educators.


Introduction
Mediation holds that people around learners act as mediators who "may be the parent, facilitator, teacher, or some significant other who plays the intentional role of explaining, emphasizing, interpreting, or extending the environment so that the learner builds up a meaningful internal model of the context or the world experienced" (Seng, Pou, & Tan, 2003, p. 11).When this takes place in language classrooms, teachers should interact with students and help them to apply the language themselves instead of only providing them with the language knowledge (Fisher, 2005).With the emphasis on facilitating learner autonomy and life-long education in recent reform efforts, it has become significant that students are supposed to self-control their learning and become more active thinkers and problem-solvers (Ting, 1987;Yang, 2003;Ye, 2007).To ensure learner-centered EFL (English as a foreign language) instruction, teachers highlight the development of students' independence and autonomy by re-orienting their roles (Ministry of Education of China [MOE], 2001).Current education reforms in China imply that it is necessary for the teacher to implement the role as mediator instead of as disseminator in the language classroom as the value of adult mediation in children's learning can never be overstressed (Seng et al., 2003).As such, EFL teachers' re-education has been put on the agenda due to the poor implementation of mediation in China's secondary schools.

Significance
China's new National Standards of English Curriculum for Basic Education (hereafter referred to as Curriculum Standards) was generated on the basis of multiple intelligences theory and social-constructivism (Fu, 2003;Gardner, 1993;Peng, 2005;Tang, 2009;Yang, 2005;Yu, 2005).Multiple intelligences view that "learners individually possess diverse learning styles and intelligences" (Ediger, 2000, p. 35), and social-constructivism "provides various ways to access the students' multiple intelligences" (Teague, 2000, p. 9).Now, the implementation of the Curriculum Standards is in process throughout China before another new circle of curriculum reforms for secondary education is made known.The Curriculum Standards contends that the teacher should no longer be authoritative but become the co-constructor of knowledge with learners (MOE, 2001).Teachers need to care more about the teaching process rather than results, to help students know how to learn instead of only what to learn, and to help students establish creative learning instead of adaptive learning (MOE, 2001).However, numerous researchers and educators have articulated the teacher role shifts under the Curriculum Standards theoretically rather than practically (e.g., Fu, 2003;Peng, 2005;Tang, 2009;Yang, 2005;Yu, 2005).They have investigated the application of Feuerstein's (1980) 12 mediated learning experience (MLE) criteria through questionnaire and interview surveys, reporting that teachers fail to entirely adopt the 12 techniques to "mediate" their students' learning.To their thinking, teacher roles required by the Standards should be assessors, helpers, researchers, organizers, participants, tutors, facilitators, and prompters (Harmer, 2001;MOE, 2001).Actually, this kind of shift in teachers' roles foregrounds the role of mediator whose functions encompass those of the above teacher roles (Feuerstein, 1980;Sun, 2005).The MOE can decide goals, objectives, curricula, syllabi, and textbooks throughout the country since China's education system is characterized by high centralization (Liao, 2003;Yu, 2001).Nonetheless, the spirit of the 2001 national Curriculum Standards for secondary schools has not really been put into effect, and EFL teachers' elementary role as knowledge-giver through grammar-translation has remained unchanged (Le & He, 2007;Qiao, 2008;Wei, 2004;Zhang, 2007).As such, this study tries to fill the gap in the existing literature on the extent of teachers' adherence to MOE requirements in EFL instruction.

Questions
This study aims to probe into the cause of the unpopularity of mediative classrooms in China and what can be done to make a classroom more mediative.To fulfill this target, two research questions that follow to be addressed are proposed: 1. What are EFL teachers' classroom practices in relation to 12 mediation functions?2. What situational constraints hinder teachers from playing the mediator role? 4. Conceptual Framework People prefer to talk of constructivism in two forms: individual constructivism and social constructivism (Woolfolk, 2004).Individual constructivist approaches are related to how individuals establish certain elements in terms of cognition and affection derived from their psychological organ (Phillips, 1997).Piaget is a preeminent representative of individual constructivism (Paris, Byrnes, & Paris, 2001).By contrast, social constructivism cares about the formation of communal knowledge of distinct schools and how the process of people's common cognition about the world is conveyed to other individuals of a socio-cultural community (Woolfolk, 2004).Vygotsky and Feuerstein are two dominant figures in the school of social constructivism (Palincsar, 1998;Prawat, 1996).This review aims to survey the body of literature informing the two research questions of the study, introducing the conceptual structure concerning Feuerstein's 12 MLE features incorporated into Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (ZPD).

Vygotsky's Social Constructivism
Vygotsky's famous "Three Principal Assumptions" is known as his greatest contribution to social constructivism (see Vygotsky, 1978).The first assumption is that the community and its internal members or people play a central role by interacting with the individual in that individual's view of the world (Vasireddy, 2007).The second is the assumption that the tools, whose type and quality determine the pattern and speed of cognitive development, are involved in the surrounding culture and language and important adults (Vasireddy, 2007).The ZPD is viewed as Vygotsky's third principal assumption, conceptualized as "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and level of potential development as determined through solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers" (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86).At the beginning of a learning process, the teacher is bound to undertake the majority of the task before the teacher and students assume the collaborative duty (Schunk, 2000).The teacher gradually reduces the help as scaffolding until students can perform on their own since they become more capable (Campione et al., 1984)."The key is to ensure that the scaffolding keeps learners in the ZPD, which is altered as they develop capabilities.Students are challenged to learn within the bounds of the ZPD" (Schunk, 2000, p.245).

Feuerstein's Mediation
Since not every interaction involving a task, a learner, and a mediator has a quality of MLE, according to Feuerstein (1980), a system of the MLE criteria is developed to distinguish different levels of MLE interactions.In the MLE program, Feuerstein proposes 12 parameters as indispensable criteria for evaluating the quality of MLE interaction as shown in Table 1.Insert Table 1 Here Feuerstein (1980) believes that teachers can "mediate" in numbers of different ways.Even each of all the 12 criteria of the MLE program (see Table 1) also belongs to a mediation strategy (Skuy & Mentis, 1999).In other terms, there are 12 different ways of mediation rooted in these 12 MLE criteria, which might provide adequate flexible space for the teacher in the language classroom to conduct mediation (Seng et al., 2003).The first "three criteria are also considered universal, in the sense that they can be present in all races, ethnic groups, cultural entities, and socioeconomic strata" (Seng et al.,p. 36).By contrast, "the remaining nine criteria are considered responsible for the process of diversification of humankind in terms of cognitive styles, need systems, types of skills mastered, and the structure of knowledge", and "these nine criteria are also considered situational because they need not always be present in every MLE" (p.36).Given the need of this study, the operational definitions of universal mediation and situational mediation are drawn on, referring to the first three MLE criteria and the remaining nine respectively.

Missing Link: from Vygotsky to Feuerstein
Vygotsky and Feuerstein seem to facilitate each other in effectively important manners in the case of their works since Vygotsky (1978) utters the ZPD, a location in which the probability of enhancement of a learner's abilities is able to be seen.Lantolf (2000) asserts that the ZPD is where social forms of mediation are performed and realized.Feuerstein's (1980) MLE describes what comes about within the ZPD, which centers on a mediator's helping learners get through this special zone and obtain their competence development in the zone eventually.Once students receive high-quality mediated learning in the school setting, they will have some grasp on how to learn for the future, at least tacitly and imperceptibly (Feuerstein, 1980).Vygotsky believes that human "higher mental processes are functions of mediated activity" (cited in Seng et al., 2003, p. 6), but even then " the role of the human mediator is not fully elaborated within [Vygotsky's] theoretical framework" and that the theoretical gap is thus bridged with the help of "Feuerstein's (1990) theory of mediated learning, which assigns the major role to a human mediator" ( Kozulin, 1994, p. 284, cited in Seng et al., 2003, p. 7).Accordingly, the application of mediation theory incorporated into the ZPD is expected to be the strongest rationale to carry out teachers' role as mediator in that students' facilitation is the target of education (MOE, 2001).At this point, it seems meaningful for the ZPD and mediation theory to be applied together for the most persuasive justifications of this study.

Method
To obtain the data to address the research questions, a questionnaire survey was applied which was adapted from Williams and Burden's Mediation Questionnaire (2000) testing teachers' classroom practices in terms of Feuerstein's 12 MLE features, with reference to Liao's Communicative Language Teaching Questionnaire (2003) (see Appendix).The revised mediation questionnaire contains four question items summarized as shown in Table 2. Given potential linguistic biases from EFL, a Chinese version questionnaire was employed, subject to a panel of experts in the Chinese language.Insert Table 2 Here 6. Subjects This study was conducted in Henan province located in eastern central China for the accessible population (Fraenkel & Wallen, 2007).According to Creswell's (2005) rough estimate of a survey sample size, 350 teachers were chosen randomly from 350 secondary schools in Henan.A vital difficulty with the survey was that only a small percentage of the pre-sampled respondents tended to answer the questionnaire (Liao, 2003).Out of the 350 distributed questionnaire sheets, 152 effective copies (43.4%) were returned, but "power is not an issue" since the sample size is large with 100 or more subjects (Stevens, 1996, p. 6, cited in Pallant, 2007, p. 205).

Data Analysis
The data for this study involve the 152 participating teachers' answered questionnaire sheets.The quantitative data analysis was processed with the help of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 16.0 for Windows, while the qualitative data were coded and analyzed manually.

Findings and Discussion
The findings of the study are reported in order of the two research questions in terms of the survey, followed by the findings discussion in relation to each of the research questions.8.1 Findings and Discussion for RQ1: What Are EFL Teachers' Classroom Practices Related to 12 Mediation Functions?Most of the teacher participants in the survey argued that they played the roles of situational mediator rather than the universal mediator.Around one third of the participating teachers claimed to play the PPP (presentation, practice, and production) instructor role.Item 2 of the questionnaire had a 5-point Likert-scale to measure the teachers' assessment on how often they implemented each of the 12 MLE features.The respondents' mediative behaviors in terms of the 12 statements were measured on a scale of 1 to 5, representing never, sometimes, often, usually, and always (see Appendix).The mean scores of the 12 mediation features (marked b1-b12), frequencies, standard deviations, and ranking orders (according to M) as regards the teacher participants' behaviors are shown in Table 3, which shows that the means of "a belief in positive outcomes" (1 st ), "sharing" (2 nd ), "a sense of competence" (3 rd ), and "control of own behavior" (4 th ) are ranked the four highest.By contrast, the scores for the first three features (i.e., universal mediation) are a little lower, in which, "purpose beyond the here and now" (12 th ) is rated lowest.Insert Table 3 Here In addition, most of them claimed to perform situational mediators or play "to some extent" either as they found universal mediation too difficult to implement or as they held no correct knowledge of universal mediation.The teacher participants' classroom practices were restricted by situational constraints when they attempted to implement the situational mediator role.Though the subjects had no correct knowledge of universal mediation, some of them asserted that they were implementing the universal mediator role.They seemed to conform to social desirability which "is a response set characterized by answering questions in the direction that is most socially accepted, regardless of whether such an answer is actually correct for the response" (Liebert & Liebert, 1995, p. 242).No practitioners like to fall behind as they are urged to administer role shifts in the ongoing curriculum reforms of China.

Findings and Discussion for RQ2: What Situational Constraints Hinder Teachers from Playing the Mediator Role?
Item 3 of the questionnaire required the respondents to answer the 20 statements to be measured on a scale of 1 to 6, representing not sure, not at all, only a little, fairly, a lot, and quite a lot.The mean score for each item was 3.5, with the minimum total score of the scale 20 and the maximum 120.Most of the participants (n = 147) offered their answers with 17 missing values involved, and five teacher participants (n = 5) left this question item blank whose missing data did not constitute a threat to the wanted validity of the instrument since the valid sample size exceeded 100 (Stevens, 1996, cited in Pallant, 2007).No participant added other situational constraints while scaling this question item.All the 20 statements were categorized into three sections in relation to (a) China's current education system (a-d), (b) the students (e-g), and (c) the teachers themselves (h-t).The frequencies of the 20 constraint items, means, standard deviations, and ratings (according to M) for the participants' situational constraints that they scaled are summarized in Table 4, which shows that the mean of 75% of the items (n = 15) is over 3.5(M > 3.5).The top three constraints are "lack of advice from related experts" (1 st ), "lack of training as the role of mediator" (2 nd ), and "lack of funds paid for teacher role training programs" (3 rd ).The remaining 25% of the constraints (n = 5) were believed least influential (M < 3.5), which are "lack of cultural knowledge" (16 th ), "mandatory textbooks" (17 th ), "mandatory syllabuses" (18 th ), "lack of oral English proficiency" (19 th ), and "attitudes towards teaching work" (20 th ).

Insert Table 4 Here
Of the classroom constraints that the teachers described in the survey, the ones associated with the teachers' training as the role of mediator were perceived to be the most serious.Most of the participants valued the exposure to the re-education related to the role of mediator and hoped to be qualified for the role of mediator with the help of relevant training programs and skilled experts.The situational constraints respecting the teachers' "shortages" like "low oral proficiency in English" and "lack of knowledge of mediation" were almost least serious probably by reason of social desirability (Brown, 2001;Liao, 2003).

Implications
The main purpose of this study is to investigate the reasons behind poor implementation of mediation in China's secondary schools and explore potential approaches to make the EFL classroom more mediative.The findings of this study show that the teachers' classroom constraints involving the lack of knowledge of mediation prevented them from implementing mediation.The following discussion suggests solutions to the situational constraints that the participating teachers encountered.The suggestions cover implications in the current educational contexts respecting teachers' enhancement of EFL proficiency and re-education of MLE knowledge.China is taking active measures to facilitate the re-education of EFL teachers in order to continuously raise the holistic quality of instructional power (National Curriculum, 2000).In 1999, the MOE proposed the execution of teachers' continuing education project for China's secondary schools, whose goals "are to train all the teachers in order to meet the needs of quality education, particularly the training for implementing the new national curriculum…and improving the pedagogical practice" (National Curriculum, 2000, p. 18).China has about 572,000 secondary school EFL teachers (NBSC, 2008).Apparently, upgrading the subject and pedagogical knowledge of so many teachers would be expensive and time-consuming, so the normal type of re-training available would probably be short-term intensive seminars and workshops (Byron, 2000;Cheng & Wang, 2004;Liao, 2004)."The educational institutions engaged in the training of school teachers consist mainly of teacher education institutions in various levels, in-service teacher training schools or institutes, and other training institutions, as well as the schools employing teachers" (National Curriculum, 2000, p. 18).This project seemed to affect around 550,000 secondary school teachers and millions of secondary EFL learners in China (Education in China, 2005;Liu & Gong, 2000;NBSC, 2008).Post-training teachers' classrooms, however, are still characterized by teacher-centeredness and textbook-centeredness as "teacher colleges/universities are accustomed to copying comprehensive universities, and taking care of developing discipline knowledge and research, and paying little attention to pedagogical knowledge and abilities" (National Curriculum, 2000, p. 18).Therefore, it seems equally important to extend teachers' dimension of knowledge on the implementation of mediation at the time of the promotion of teachers' comprehensive language skills.

Conclusions
Hopefully, the study is among the initial attempts to explore EFL teachers' implementation of the mediator role.Based on the findings, a conclusion is drawn that most secondary school EFL teachers fail to mediate their students' learning in China's present educational setting.It is toughly challenging for EFL teachers to administer it smoothly due to the situational constraints associated with the education system, students, and teachers themselves.In particular, most of the teacher participants view the lack of advice from relevant experts and of training on implementing the mediator as the most influential of all the constraints.It is thus proposed that EFL teachers should re-orient their roles from traditional instructor to mediator with the aid of teachers' re-education of MLE knowledge to adapt to the progress of the society for the time being.

Mediation Questionnaire
Teacher ID: ____________ Dear participants, I am conducting research on "Mediation performance and situational constraints of China's secondary school EFL teachers" and would appreciate a few minutes of your time in accomplishing this questionnaire in order to help with my ongoing research.Your responses will be used for research purposes only and kept absolutely confidential.There are no correct or wrong answers since the items cover matters of opinion rather than fact.The validity of this survey depends on the extent to which your responses are open and frank.So you are warmly required to answer honestly.

Yours sincerely, Xxx
Question 1: Please read the following accounts on four EFL teachers' roles in their classrooms.Answer the questions that follow each account.
Teacher A thinks the teacher should make learners realize the significance of a learning task so that they can see the value of the task to their own.Learners should know how to conduct a learning activity will help them beyond the immediate time and place.In presenting a task, he makes instructions clear and ensures the intention is understood by the learners.

Is the role that you play in your own class like this?
Yes_______ No _______ To some extent ________ Please make comments on your answer here: __________________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________________ ____________ Teacher B argues that she fosters the learners' feelings of competence by encouraging them to control their own learning, thinking, and actions.She teaches the learners how to set realistic goals and to locate approaches of achieving them.Helping the learners to develop an internal need to confront challenges and then seek for new ones, she makes them monitor the changes in themselves, and understand human beings are constantly changing.During the activity, the learners' optimistic awareness is developed so that they realize the task is not as difficult as it seems to be.

Is the role that you play in your own class like this?
Yes_______ No _______ To some extent ________ Please make comments on your answer here: __________________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________________ ____________ Teacher C believes it important to make his students recognize that some problems are better solved by inviting them to share behaviors and co-operation among themselves on the basis of their own personality and the awareness of their own individuality and uniqueness.He also helps them to establish a sense of belonging to the whole class during the completion of the task.1.3.Is the role that you play in your own class like this?
Yes_______ No _______ To some extent ________ Please make comments on your answer here: __________________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________________ ____________ Teacher D regards language as a system of grammatical structures.She teaches EFL basically to ensure that the students can use EFL correctly.The materials that she uses rely on teaching a list of grammatical structures.In her class, she follows the PPP procedure (i.e.presentation, practice, & production) for drilling new grammatical structures.Namely, she first presents a new grammatical structure, then directs her students to practice the structure in a controlled way, and finally asks them to use the structure in a free production activity.1.4.Is the role that you play in your own class like this?
Yes_______ No _______ To some extent ________ Please make comments on your answer here: __________________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________________ ____________ Question 2: For each of the following 12 statements, please circle the figure from 1 for never to 5 for always that most closely agrees with your routine teaching practices.Consider your answers in the context of your current job or past work experience.------Bachelor's Degree ------Two-Year Certificate ------Secondary School Certificate ------Others The grade you are teaching in: -------Junior Grade One ------Junior Grade Two -------Junior Grade Three -------Senior Grade One -------Senior Grade Two -------Senior Grade Three The average number of the students in your class: __________ Your contact address and phone number (if applicable): __________________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________________ ____________ The teacher makes students realize the importance of a learning task so that they can look at the significance of the task to their own and in a broader cultural context.2. Purpose beyond the here and now Explains to learners how conducting a learning activity will help them in the future beyond the moment and situation for the time being only.

Shared intention
In presenting a task, the teacher must make instructions clear and ensure the intention is understood and reciprocated by learners.

A sense of competence
Fosters learners' feelings of competence and capability of learning.

Control of own behavior
Encourages students to become autonomous learners by self-controlling their learning procedure.

Goal-setting
Teaches learners how to establish achievable targets and to locate approaches for the purpose of realizing them.

Challenge
Helps learners to develop an internal need to confront challenges and to seek for new challenges in life.

Awareness of change
Stimulates learners to monitor changes in themselves and to understand the fact that humans are changeable all the time.9.A belief in positive outcomes Urges learners to assume that there is always the possibility of finding a solution, even when faced with an apparently intractable problem.10.Sharing Invites learners to share behaviors and collaboration among themselves and to perceive that it is advisable for some problems to be addressed collaboratively.

Individuality
Helps learners realize their individual characteristics in terms of their unique aspects.12.A sense of belonging Aids learners to establish a consciousness of pertaining to the whole class community in the process of the completion of the task.
Note.Adapted from Instrumental enrichment: An intervention program for cognitive modifiability by R .Feuerstein, 1980.
There are 20 factors listed below.Please indicate how much each factor influences your teaching role by circling the figure from 1 to 6 implying not sure to quite a lot.Check all that apply.If there are some other factors that hinder you playing the role of mediator, please list them here and also circle the relevant figure representing the extent to which each factor influences your role in the classroom.

Table 3 .
Teachers' Responses to the Behaviors Relating to Mediation

Table 4 .
Teachers' Responses to Situational Constraints