English language teacher learning in professional learning communities: a case study of a Chinese secondary school

Through a discourse analysis of the qualitative data collected in an ethnographic approach, this study investigates learning emerging in an English teachers’ professional learning community (PLC) at a Chinese secondary school in Shanghai. It explores the discourse features of situated interactions in two types of typical events occurring regularly in this PLC, participant roles in the interactions, and how learning occurs in the community. This study reveals that different foci and functions of the meetings largely determined the discourse features, and that community members tended to take different roles and demonstrate different aspects of their identity. Despite the differences, the two meetings both had a high percentage of episodes of pedagogical reasoning(EPRs) and low rate of distributed participation per episode. It is implied that both meetings were conducive to teacher learning, but the learning foci (topics covered in the two meetings) were different. More distributed participation may be needed to encourage collaborative learning.