LANGUAGE

TEACHING
RESEARCH

Language Teaching Research

Teacher education and teacher 14(3) 259–275

© The Author(s) 2010

autonomy: Creating spaces for

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DOI: 10.1177/1362168810365236
experimentation in secondary http://ltr.sagepub.com

school English language

teaching

Phil Benson
Hong Kong Institute of Education

Abstract
This article reports on a collective case study of four Hong Kong secondary school teachers’
experiences of constraints on teacher autonomy in English language teaching, and their implications
for teacher education. Findings suggested that the constraints were systemic and mainly organized
around ‘Schemes of Work’ and school-based supervision and surveillance mechanisms. Nevertheless,
the four teachers were able to create spaces for teacher autonomy, but the nature of these spaces
and what they were used for varied, partly according to the school context and partly according
to the identities developed through previous experiences of the education system as learners
and teachers. The study concludes that the impact of teacher education courses that depend on
experimentation with new ideas in the classroom is liable to be limited in many state school
systems. It also concludes that language teacher education may benefit from a greater sensitivity to
the affordances in teachers’ working conditions for teacher autonomy and experimentation.

Keywords
teacher autonomy, language teacher education, teacher identity, teacher biography

I  Introduction
The study reported in this article began with comments made by a group of Hong
Kong secondary school teachers several months after they had completed a Master’s
degree elective assignment, in which they had prepared outlines for a two-week teaching
and learning unit and justified them in terms of pedagogical theories introduced in

Corresponding author
Phil Benson, English Department, Hong Kong Institute of Education, 10 Lo Ping Road, Tai Po, NT,
Hong Kong, China
Email: pbenson@ied.edu.hk

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260 Language Teaching Research 14(3)

the module. After the assignments had been returned, I asked several of the teachers
whether they had had the opportunity to put the units they had designed into practice
and, if so, what the results had been. Without exception, the answer was ‘no’. More-
over, they had never intended to try out the units they had designed, because they
knew in advance that their working conditions would not allow them to do so. When
I probed this point further, several explanations emerged, including constraints
imposed by the officially mandated English curriculum, the pressures of the exami-
nation system, the culture of Hong Kong schools, and high teacher and student
workloads.
These arguments are familiar enough in the context of research on learner auton-
omy, which has argued that teachers themselves need some degree of autonomy –
understood here as both the freedom and internal capacity to exercise discretion in
matters of curriculum implementation (Benson & Huang, 2008) – if they are to foster
autonomy among their students. It seemed, however, that these teachers’ comments
also raised broader questions about the impact of teacher education courses. Several
writers have commented on the gap between teacher education courses and the day-
to-day practice of teaching (Flores, 2001; Varghese et al., 2005; Miller, 2009). Teacher
education also appears to be most effective when it is integrated with practice, a view
that is explicit in approaches such as action research, reflective practice and explor-
atory practice (Allwright, 2003; Burns, 2009; Burton, 2009), although teacher educa-
tion for state school systems remains campus-based in many parts of the world. In
Hong Kong, for example, teacher education is mostly university-based and delivered
through Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes, postgraduate diplomas, and govern-
ment-funded release courses for in-service teachers. Johnstone (2004, p. 669) argues
that teacher education has a ‘vital part’ to play in mediating between applied linguis-
tics research and language pedagogy. However, this gap is unlikely to be bridged if
teachers lack opportunities to experiment with ideas introduced in teacher education
courses, or if their working conditions are not conducive to the development of prac-
tice. For Hong Kong secondary school teachers, the teachers’ working conditions
seemed to constrain not only the implementation of the idea of learner autonomy, but
any kind of experimentation at all. In order to investigate these constraints in more
depth, I invited four teachers who took the Master’s degree in the following year to
participate in an interview-based project. Building partly on an earlier Hong Kong
study of follow-up from an in-service teacher education programme on the use of
information technology in English language teaching (Wong & Benson, 2006), this
study was designed to investigate both structural and internal constraints on teacher
autonomy, and the ways in which teachers find spaces for experimentation within
these constraints.
After a brief review of research on teacher autonomy and teacher identity and a
description of the methodology for the study, findings are discussed under three head-
ings: how decisions about teaching and learning activities are made, constraints on
teacher autonomy and the ways in which teachers find ways around them. This is fol-
lowed by a discussion of the interaction of individual biographies and working contexts
in the construction of teacher identities, and relationships between these identities and
teacher autonomy.

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Phil Benson 261

II Teacher autonomy and teacher identity

In an article discussing influences on what and how language teachers teach, Crookes
(1997, p. 67) began by summarizing seven influences identified by Freeman and
Freeman (1994):

1. how teachers were taught themselves;

2. their professional training;
3. colleagues and administration;
4. exposure to new ideas;
5. availability of materials;
6. the types of students they teach; and
7. their personal views of learners and learning.

Describing this as a ‘commonsense, but not particularly critical account’, Crookes went
on to discuss four structural influences that were indicative of the ‘deskilling’ of lan-
guage teachers in public schools:

1. lack of teacher involvement in curriculum design;

2. contradictions between educational purposes and the socializing and child-minding
functions of schools;
3. isolation and lack of interaction fostered by the layout of schools and teachers’
work routines; and
4. under-funding of programmes.

Crookes (1997) also observed that although teacher education courses provided training
in programme design, school curricula were not designed by teachers, but ‘mandated by
higher authority or determined by the need to prepare students for standardized tests’
(p. 68). He concluded that the influences identified by Freeman and Freeman (1994)
were likely to play an important role in conditioning the ways teachers teach, but these
were also ‘influenced by the effects of the social structures in which they are embedded,
which create them, and which they in turn create’ (p. 73). Although Crookes’ study was
grounded in the specific conditions of language teaching in Hawaiian public schools in
the 1990s, his observations clearly have a wider relevance to language education in state-
funded school systems around the world.
More recently, Breen (2007, p. 1069) has pointed to the continuing relevance of
Crookes’ account to English language teaching. He has also called attention to the ways
in which factors related to globalization and international migration are leading to ‘a
crisis’ in the professionalism of language teachers worldwide. While this crisis reflects
structural pressures, Breen argues that many teachers ‘are resisting inevitable changes on
the basis of former stances and values that are no longer sustainable’. In the light of these
changes, Breen presents the profession with a choice:

Either we perceive ourselves as a teacher of language unconnected to wider social, cultural,

and political processes and, thereby, contribute to the marginalization of our profession, or we

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262 Language Teaching Research 14(3)

accept the formative role we play in these processes and confront the possibilities for beneficial
change in the intercultural work that we do. (Breen, 2007, p. 1068)

In addition to foregrounding the broader intercultural purposes of language teaching in

the context of globalization and migration, Breen also highlights teachers’ roles and
responsibilities as agents within the systems of structural constraint under which they are
employed.
The idea that influences on how teachers teach are a matter of both structure and
agency is also evident in recent work on language teacher identities. In much of this work
teacher identity is – as Varghese et al. (2005, p. 39) put it – both

a profoundly individual and psychological matter because it concerns the self-image and other-
image of particular teachers [and] a social matter because the formation, negotiation, and
growth of teacher identity is a fundamentally social process taking place in institutional set-
tings such as teacher education programs and schools.

Varghese et al. call for research that seeks to ‘understand how language teachers form
their identities in communities, among others, in their teacher education programmes,
and beyond that, in their schools and classrooms’. This research, they argue, ‘must be
able to capture the social and institutional settings in which identities are formed, but it
must also acknowledge the effect of such processes on individual minds’ (p. 40). We
might add to this that the construction and reconstruction of identities in teacher educa-
tion programmes often comes into conflict with the priorities of schools. In-service
teacher education programmes, for example, often adopt a reformist stance in relation to
the education systems in which their students work. The social and physical settings of
university-based teacher education programmes provide favourable climates for thinking
about experiment and innovation. Policy-driven reforms are also often implemented in
conjunction with commissioned programmes from teacher education institutions. But as
Wong and Benson’s (2006) study of two teachers’ attempts to implement ideas and prac-
tices from an in-service programme on the use of information technology in English
teaching shows, follow-up in the classroom is conditioned by a complex web of factors,
including structural constraints within the education system and the school, and the inter-
nalization of these constraints within individual understandings of what can be achieved
within a particular setting or situation.
Although the literature discussed so far does not call upon the idea of teacher auton-
omy, it is a relevant idea in as much as it points to the importance of teachers’ acquiring
a degree of freedom from both structural and internal constraints on their autonomy if
they are to carry out their work effectively. The literature in education has tended to
view teacher autonomy as a ‘workplace condition’ (Clement & Vandenberghe, 2000, p.
81) involving ‘the perception that teachers have regarding whether they control them-
selves and their work environment’ (Pearson & Moomaw, 2005, p. 41). In language
teaching research, following the publication of Little’s (1995) seminal article, it has
tended to be viewed more as a professional capacity, somewhat parallel to the idea of
learner autonomy. This view has relatively strong implications for teacher education.
Suggesting that ‘language teachers are more likely to succeed in promoting learner

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Phil Benson 263

autonomy if their own education has encouraged them to be autonomous’, Little argued
that ‘teacher education should be subject to the same processes of negotiation as are
required for the promotion of learner autonomy in the language classroom’ (p. 180).
This comment represents a challenge to teacher education programmes, which are
often subject to the same kinds of curriculum regulation that are found in schools. It
also raises the question of whether the working conditions of teachers will allow them
to exercise the capacities for autonomy that might be gained during a teacher education
programme. More recently, therefore, teacher autonomy has been viewed as a more
complex construct involving a certain kind of relationship between professional free-
dom and internal capacity. Some degree of professional freedom is required if the
internal capacity for teacher autonomy is to grow, while the teacher’s exercise of this
capacity can also widen the space of professional freedom in which it is exercised
(McGrath, 2000; Benson & Huang, 2008).
Arguing that most teachers’ working conditions severely constrain their capacity to
take charge of their own teaching, Benson (2000) developed a rudimentary model of
constraints on language teacher autonomy, represented by expanding circles of school
rules and conventions, textbooks and curricula, educational policy, and conceptions of
language as an educational subject matter that condition what counts as foreign language
teaching and learning. From the students’ perspective, however, teachers are the most
immediate representatives of educational authority and, to this extent, constraints on
teaching and learning in the classroom tend to be mediated by teachers, whatever their
ultimate source may be. For this reason, teacher autonomy must involve a self-critical
approach towards the ways in which wider structural constraints on learner autonomy are
mediated through the teacher’s own agency. Extending this argument, Mackenzie (2002)
calls attention to teachers’ inner desires to influence the environments in which they
work and to participate in institutional change, while Lamb (2000, p. 128) argues that
‘teachers need to understand the constraints upon their practice but, rather than feeling
disempowered, they need to empower themselves by finding the spaces and opportunities
for manoeuvre.’ Vieira (2003, p. 222) argues similarly that a conception of teaching as a
‘moral and political activity’ presupposes that ‘teachers are both willing and able to exert
some control over educational settings by mediating between constraints and ideals.’ In
this sense, teacher autonomy can be understood both as a working condition that allows
room for teachers’ professional discretion and as the teacher’s capacity to create this
working condition within prevailing constraints.
This view of teacher autonomy provides the broad framework for this study, which
attempts to develop Benson’s (2000) model of constraints on teacher autonomy through
an empirically grounded study of Hong Kong English language teachers’ work. The
study goes beyond this model, however, in looking at the ways in which teachers find
‘spaces and opportunities for manoeuvre’ (Lamb, 2000, p. 128) within these constraints.
These two sides of the problem are partly conceptualized in terms of structure and
agency: structure accounting for systems of constraint and agency accounting for the
ways that teachers find room for manoeuvre. However, if this view of teacher autonomy
as a struggle against structural constraints is blended with Varghese et al.’s view of
teacher identities developing across experiences of teacher education, schools, and class-
rooms, a more complex account of teacher autonomy as identity is liable to emerge. It is

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264 Language Teaching Research 14(3)

this perspective that largely informs the interpretation of data in this study, in which
teachers’ capacities to create spaces to try out ideas from teacher education programmes
are also viewed as being conditioned by identities formed across a variety of educational
experiences on both sides of the classroom.

III  Methodology
The study addressed three research questions:

1. How do teachers make day-to-day decisions about teaching and learning in Hong
Kong secondary school English classrooms?
2. What factors constrain their capacity to make their own decisions?
3. How do they create spaces to exercise their professional discretion, and how do
they make use of them?

The study was designed as an interview-based, ‘collective case study’ (Stake, 1995),
which is understood here as a number of parallel case studies conducted in order to
inquire into a particular phenomenon. In this instance, the phenomenon investigated was
constraints on teacher autonomy in English language teaching in the Hong Kong second-
ary school system. The case studies concerned the working conditions of four teachers
from four different secondary schools, reflecting Stake’s (2005) view that four is usually
an adequate number of case studies to provide a rounded perspective on a phenomenon.
In this study, it was assumed that data on four schools would be adequate to model com-
mon elements across most schools within the system and to identify some variations in
teachers’ responses to these elements.
At the time of the study the four participants (see Table 1) were approaching the end of
a two-year part-time MA in Applied Linguistics programme at a university in Hong Kong.
All had taken the route of a Bachelor’s degree plus a Postgraduate Diploma in Education
(PGDE), rather than the alternative of a four-year Bachelor of Education and, with the
exception of Eric, all had language degrees. Stephanie also differed from the others in that
she had advanced qualifications in music and had mainly worked as a music teacher in the
early years of her career. It also emerged from the interviews that Lucy and Mabel were
‘career’ English teachers, who had wanted to teach English from an early age. Eric and
Stephanie, on the other hand, were ‘accidental’ English teachers who had taken up the job,
in Eric’s case because of an interruption in his Law degree and in Stephanie’s case because
of the over-supply of music teachers in Hong Kong schools. This also meant that Eric and
Stephanie had taught in more than one school and had tended to be assigned to relatively
weaker classes than those that had been assigned to Lucy and Mabel.
The data were collected using semi-structured interviews, or interviews in which
there is ‘a sequence of themes to be covered, as well as suggested questions [and] an
openness to changes of sequence and forms of questions in order to follow up the answers
given and the stories told by the subjects’ (Kvale, 1996, p. 124). In this case, the themes
were defined by the research questions, such that the main part of the interview was
guided by prompts and follow-up questions designed to elicit a description of how deci-
sions about day-to-day teaching were made in the interviewees’ schools. Factors

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Phil Benson 265

Table 1  The participants in the study

Participants First degree Professional training Years of teaching experience

Eric Law PGDE (PT) 10 (2 schools)

Lucy Translation PGDE (FT)   4 (1 school)
Mabel English / Linguistics PGDE (PT)   6 (1 school)
Stephanie English / Chinese PGDE (PT)   7 (3 schools)
Notes: Pseudonyms are used to protect participant confidentiality. The pseudonyms were chosen by
the participants, who were known to the researcher by other English names.

influencing decision-making processes were elicited by questions asking the participants

to explain why they thought decisions were made in the way that they were. In all four
interviews, it became clear that the participants felt constrained by the decision-making
systems in their schools and, towards the end of the interview, they were asked to explain
how they felt about these constraints and whether they did anything to get around them.
The interviews were conducted in English, lasted between 60 and 90 minutes and were
audio-recorded and transcribed.
In an interview study of this type, there are inevitable concerns about the power rela-
tionship between the researcher and the interviewees, and the possibility that the inter-
viewees were led towards certain responses by the researcher’s agenda. In this case, the
researcher was the co-ordinator of the MA programme on which the students were
enrolled and had taught them one year earlier. However, this was not a course that
involved a school-based assignment. Moreover, although the study was prompted by
concerns arising from the assignment for the elective course referred to at the beginning
of this article, the researcher did not teach this course and did not mention it during the
study. As it was presented to the participants, the aim of the study was connected to my
research on modelling constraints on teacher autonomy in schools and was not directly
related to the MA programme or the impact of teacher education. I also knew the partici-
pants well and enjoyed a friendly relationship with them. These aspects of the researcher–
participant relationship may mitigate concerns about the validity of the findings of the
study to a certain extent, although it is acknowledged that all interview data is influenced
by this relationship and other contextual factors.
As the main objective of this collective case study was to model constraints within the
school system, the interviewees were treated as ‘informants’ in a collaborative inquiry,
rather than as research ‘subjects’ or to be investigated. This was reflected in the research
design; for example, the participants were made aware of the purpose of the study before
the interview, and they understood that I wanted them to explain the organization of work
in their schools and the factors that influenced it. Data analysis involved repeated reading
and comparison of the interview transcripts in order to build up a model of decision-
making processes across the schools and variations among the schools and teachers. In
this respect, the participants’ statements were mostly taken at their face value as repre-
senting the views of experienced insiders. This approach is adopted in the first three
sections of the findings, which directly address the three research questions of the study.
At the same time, the participants provided information and expressed views that were

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266 Language Teaching Research 14(3)

susceptible to deeper analysis in terms of teacher identities and their relationship to con-
straints on teacher autonomy. Although this was not the main aim of the study, some
tentative conclusions on this relationship are drawn in Section IV.4.

IV  Findings
1 How decisions are made
The first two research questions for this study are concerned with how day-to-day deci-
sions about classroom practice are made and the factors that influence the decision-making
process. Looking at these questions from an institutional perspective, the four teachers
referred most often to the power of people in supervisory or surveillance positions and to
documents that specified teaching content and tasks. Between these two, the documents
seem to have the greater authority in the sense that people in supervisory or surveillance
positions mainly exercise their authority in relation to their observance. At the highest level
are the system-wide curriculum guidelines, the syllabuses for each form (year-group), and
the public examinations at Form 5 and Form 7, which hold the whole system together and
make sure that what happens in one school happens in others in more or less the same way
at the same moment in time. The fact that teachers have to follow the syllabus rigidly and
work towards public and internal end-of-year assessments is often cited as a reason why
innovation is difficult in Hong Kong schools. What I learned from the interviews, however,
was that teachers did not usually read the curriculum guidelines or syllabus and usually
worked with only a very general idea of the kinds of questions that might come up in the
public examinations. At the school level, the influence of system-wide documents is medi-
ated by locally-produced commercial textbooks, which are based on the syllabuses for each
year and selected by the English Panel Chair (department head). Schools often supplement
textbooks with their own in-house materials and the use of textbooks and additional materi-
als is in turn specified by ‘Schemes of Work’.
Schemes of Work can be powerful constraints on teacher autonomy because they
specify not only the content to be covered, but also the pace at which the teachers of the
different classes in a year group should cover textbook units and additional tasks such as
listening exercises and compositions. Although they vary in the level of specification, in
general they specify topics, materials and tasks rather than objectives. In other words,
they prescribe what teachers should do, rather than what students should achieve. In
conjunction with the Schemes of Work, there are also regular school-based examina-
tions, tests and homework tasks, which are often common to the classes in a year group.
Lucy described the situation in her school in the following way:

Experienced teachers decide the Scheme of Work and tell us what to do in each time slot. We
do not engage in planning. When we have finished, we go on to the next unit.

This was also more or less the situation in the other three schools, although we will see
that the degree to which Schemes of Work constrained the teachers’ autonomy varied.
The four teachers also explained that Schemes of Work are powerful documents
because they are tied up with the hierarchy shown in Table 2. Schemes of Work are written

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Phil Benson 267

Table 2  Decision-making and supervisory functions in Hong Kong secondary school

English language teaching
Position Functions

School Principal Appoints panel chairs

Inspects teachers
English Panel Chair (Head of Department) Selects textbooks
Approves schemes of work
Inspects tests and homework
Form Co-ordinators Write schemes of work for year group
Co-ordinates test writing
Teachers Write tests and additional teaching materials

by Form Co-ordinators, who are usually drawn from the more experienced teachers in the
school, but the teachers I interviewed described this as a fairly mechanical task. Mabel,
for example, explained that the Form Co-ordinators tended to stick to the textbooks
because students buy them and their contents pages are often laid out so that they can eas-
ily be transformed into Schemes of Work. They are powerful documents, however,
because they tend to be used as tools for surveillance within the school. If a school is
inspected by the Education Bureau, if the English Panel is inspected by the School Prin-
cipal, or if individual teachers are inspected by the English Panel Chair, the most impor-
tant questions will be whether the Schemes of Work are in place and whether the teachers
are following them. Eric mentioned that, on one occasion when the School Principal
observed his class, he ‘said nothing about my teaching, but only that I was doing very dif-
ferent things to other teachers’. Eric also mentioned ‘homework inspections’ conducted
by Panel Chairs, who would periodically check that homework assignments had been
completed and returned to the students with feedback. Some Principals and Panel Chairs
also specify the form and quantity of correction that should be included in feedback on
written assignments and in some cases insist that all errors are corrected. If a teacher does
not assign the homework tasks or follow standardized systems for correcting work, this
could create a ‘difficult moment’ in the school. Eric recalled one teacher who had received
a warning letter for giving insufficient feedback after a homework inspection.
The four teachers all pointed to problems with this system, especially in situations
where there is a range of abilities across the classes in a year group. Lucy, for example,
made the point that, although she did not feel pressure from the system, other teachers in
her school did, especially if they were teaching weaker classes or if they were absent for
a few days. She also explained that, although the Schemes of Work helped ‘standardize’
teaching, in her view teaching should be adapted to different classes and different stu-
dents. At the same time, she explained that, if classes are not standardized, ‘many parents
will complain’. Students also looked for standardized materials and activities. ‘If you do
something with one class but not another, they think they are deprived of learning oppor-
tunities,’ she explained. Because they are tied to the syllabuses through textbooks,
Schemes of Work produce a degree of uniformity in teaching not only within schools, but
across English classrooms all over Hong Kong. Given the range of proficiency levels and
abilities among pupils of the same age there are evident difficulties in achieving this

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268 Language Teaching Research 14(3)

uniformity. But these difficulties appear to be overridden by an ideology of ‘fairness’,

which attaches particular value to uniformity of practice. As Eric put it, ‘it is very diffi-
cult to appease parents, if different classes are doing different things.’

2 Constraints on teacher autonomy

Schemes of Work, then, lie at the heart of a system of constraints on teacher autonomy in
schools that is held together by the authority of Principals and Panel Chairs and the fear
of inspection and complaint. Yet the system is also collaboratively produced by the Form
Co-ordinators who write the Schemes of Work, rank-and-file teachers who contribute
test and supplementary teaching materials, and students and parents who associate uni-
formity with fairness. In this sense, the system constrains teacher autonomy, simply
because teachers have to spend a considerable portion of their classroom time complet-
ing tasks specified in Schemes of Work. However, there is also the issue of whether
teachers feel that they are constrained by the system or not. In this respect, Mabel and
Lucy expressed different views to Eric and Stephanie. When asked if she found the sys-
tem restrictive, Mabel answered:

I think it is about half-half. We have a framework that we must fulfil, first priority. On top you
can do anything you like.

Lucy responded by saying that, ‘in a school, freedom comes with power, say when you are
promoted to a certain position.’ She did find the system restrictive, but ‘the level of the
restriction is not that annoying.’ Lucy added that she was a teacher who was ‘more ready
to listen to orders than make decisions’, who ‘enjoys the power in the classroom’ rather
than in the staff room. I also asked the teachers if they would prefer a system where –
within the framework of the existing syllabus and public examinations – each teacher
made their own decisions about what and how they taught in consultation with their stu-
dents. Mabel’s response to this referred to the practicality of the existing system:

I think if we use the textbook, at least we have something to stick to. Also it seems more sys-
tematic in terms of the students’ learning … It is very time consuming if you have to organize
everything yourself. You have to start from scratch.

Lucy thought that students would enjoy learning English much more if the teachers
planned activities together with them, but she added that the Schemes of Work gave her
a lot of ideas and, if she were assigned to a school without a set syllabus, she would prob-
ably take the old Schemes of Work with her and make use of them in the new school.
For Mabel and Lucy, therefore, Schemes of Work are constraining but not oppressive.
They also reduce workloads that would be even heavier if teachers had to plan every-
thing for themselves. They also acknowledged, however, that they could take this view
because the classes they taught were able to keep up with the pace and demands of the
Schemes of Work. A somewhat different picture emerged from Eric’s and Stephanie’s
schools, where the Schemes of Work system was, in effect, close to breaking down. In
Eric’s view, the system was not working in his school, partly because of the diverse

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Phil Benson 269

levels of proficiency among the students and partly because of a lack of strong leadership
in the English Panel. In Form 4, for example, there had been only a ‘loose syllabus’ for a
number of years and teachers had done their best to follow what they felt were the stu-
dents’ needs. Eric did not think that this was a good situation, however, and he com-
mented that the teachers had really been ‘lost’ and that the conception of what the students
should achieve in English had been unclear. At the same time, he had often argued with
the School Principal that ‘each class will come up with different problems and the teacher
is in the best position to cater for them.’ In Stephanie’s first secondary school, the Form
Co-ordinators drew up an annual plan and she based her own schedule on it. If she found
a topic too difficult for her students, she would just skip it. In her second school, there
was a plan, but again she found that ‘it was impossible to follow … different classes have
different performance, it is just an outline.’ Stephanie said that some teachers in the
school ‘played safe and followed the plan rigidly’, but she had never received complaints
from parents or colleagues for deviating from the plan:

That’s why I don’t need to worry too much about the Panel Chair or the school … I can do
what I want actually.

The main point that emerges from these comments is that, although the Schemes of
Work system aims at uniformity across Hong Kong schools, it is not a monolithic sys-
tem. In practice, the extent to which it constrains teacher autonomy is mediated by local
contextual factors such as the overall proficiency levels of students in the school, the
degree of student diversity, and the leadership of the School Principal and English Panel
Chair (whereas Eric referred to relatively weak leadership in his school, in Stephanie’s
case it was more a matter of the ‘open-mindedness’ of her Panel Chair). At the same time,
the local context also appears to influence the degree to which the system is seen as con-
straining by the teachers themselves. Stephanie’s comments suggest that this is also
related to the individual identities that teachers construct from their experiences, a point
that I return to later.

3 Getting around constraints

All of the teachers that I interviewed shared the view that English teaching should be
‘student centred’, or responsive to the abilities and interests of the students. For this rea-
son, they also argued that is was their responsibility to modify or add to Schemes of
Work and they were critical of teachers who did not do this. The extent to which they
modified or supplemented Schemes of Work also appeared to depend on how much
space the system allowed. Eric perhaps came closest to the idea of a teacher who makes
his own decisions about what and how to teach based on experience and assessment of
the demands of the curriculum, examinations and the needs of individual students. How-
ever, this was largely because of the looseness of the regulatory systems in his school.
Eric was also unhappy with this situation and expressed the feeling that he was largely
working in isolation from other teachers and without a clear sense of direction. In his
case, teacher autonomy seemed to come at the expense of being part of a collaborative
group working towards an objective. Stephanie, on other hand, was more comfortable

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270 Language Teaching Research 14(3)

with the situation in her school and explained that she could modify the plan if she
wished, by adding more vocabulary, speaking, listening and so on. For her Form 5 class,
for example, she had replaced textbook ‘listening comprehension’ activities with her
own activities based on television programmes. She also said that she often exchanged
teaching ideas with colleagues and friends in other schools, and that the main reasons she
had freedom in her teaching were the friendly and supportive atmosphere in the English
panel and a well-organized and open-minded Panel Chair. Unlike Eric, Stephanie was
apparently able to open up spaces for autonomy within a collaborative environment.
Lucy and Mabel worked within more tightly organized Schemes of Work and were,
in a sense, forced to be more creative in opening up spaces for alternative activities.
Mabel explained that in her school the teachers follow the schedule set by the Form
Co-ordinator, but if they got ahead of the schedule, they could add supplementary
activities:

We are quite flexible in the way the teachers teach … You have the schedule to follow. For
example, there are four topics for the first test. If you finish them, you can have something
extra. We always encourage the teachers to add supplementary things.

Lucy painted a similar picture, adding that she made a deliberate effort to get ahead of
the schedule:

I usually finish all the stuff in the Scheme of Work and then add some other stuff. If I feel there
is not enough time, I will streamline the material or activities. Some activities are repetitive,
so I can leave some of them to the students’ own time … If I can finish the prepared materials
a lot faster, I can simply design some other stuff to make the students happy.

On this evidence, these Hong Kong secondary school English teachers appear to exercise
their autonomy in two main ways. First, instead of simply carrying out only the tasks
specified in the Schemes of Work, they interpret its requirements in terms of student
learning, redesign tasks according to their students’ abilities and interests, and assess
when the essential goals have been achieved. Second, having done this, they attempt to
carve out spaces, in which they can meet needs that are not directly related to the require-
ments of the Scheme of Work. The point to note about this, however, is that teacher
autonomy is only exercised within the spaces that the Schemes of Work allow, which
were far more limited for Mabel and Lucy than they were for Eric and Stephanie. These
spaces are expandable, however, and both Lucy and Mabel expressed the view that being
able to expand spaces for alternative activities in order to respond to students’ abilities
and interests was a mark of good teaching in the contexts in which they worked.

4 Biographies, identities and teacher autonomy

The account I have developed so far points to the ways in which classroom decision-
making processes and the spaces that are left for the exercise of teacher autonomy are
conditioned by system-wide documents and authority structures and mediated by local
factors in schools. Agency is also apparent in the ways that teachers respond to these
conditions, especially in relation to their creativity in creating spaces for teacher autonomy

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Phil Benson 271

and what they do with them. Stephanie’s comment (cited earlier) that in her experience
parents did not complain about teachers deviating from Schemes of Work is a good
example of individual agency at work. Stephanie was the last of the four teachers to be
interviewed and – because the issue of parents’ complaints had come up in the three
previous interviews – I asked her whether the teachers in her school faced this problem
as well. In fact, the previous interviewees had all referred to the fear of parent complaint,
rather than any specific instance of it, and I interpret Stephanie’s response to my question
as implying that a good teacher would have the strength of character to do what she or he
believes to be in the interests of her or his students, rather than respond to this fear. In
conclusion, however, I want to discuss the individual biographies of the four teachers in
order to highlight the sense in which the ways in which the exercise of agency may itself
be conditioned by experiences of teaching and learning. This requires a brief biographi-
cal digression to expand on my earlier description of Mabel and Lucy as ‘career’ teachers
and Ellis and Stephanie as ‘accidental’ teachers.

a Mabel: Mabel was born in mainland China and began learning English in Primary 4,
behind her classmates who began in Primary 1 or earlier. She caught up quickly, how-
ever, and by Primary 6 she was top of her class in English. In secondary school, she
enjoyed English, worked hard at it and found that learning vocabulary was her strength.
English teaching became her ‘dream career’ and she began to observe her teachers, pay-
ing special attention to those that she thought were good. She took a degree in English,
became an English teacher immediately after graduation, and enrolled for a two-year
part-time postgraduate teaching qualification (PGDE) after her first year of teaching. At
the time of the interview, Mabel had been at the same school for six years and had
recently been invited to be Panel Chair. She had turned down this invitation because she
wanted to finish the MA programme first.

b Lucy: Lucy grew up in a working class district of Hong Kong and obtained a place at a
prestigious English-medium secondary school. She enjoyed English at school, did well in
her examinations, and majored in Chinese–English translation at university. She had
already decided that she would like to be an English teacher before she entered university,
but took a job with a textbook publisher after graduation. A year later, she returned to uni-
versity to take a full-time PGDE. She was then offered an English teaching position in a top
Chinese-medium school, where she had been for four years at the time of the interview.

c Eric: Eric attended a Chinese-medium secondary school and did not especially enjoy
English. At university he completed the first three years of a Law degree, but was unable
to go on to obtain his professional qualification for financial reasons. He took an English-
teaching job at his former secondary school, while also working as a research assistant in
the Law department of his university. Still hoping to finish his Law degree, he quit the
teaching job after two years to become a full-time research assistant. When he was unable
to renew his contract, Eric took a job at his present school, where he had been teaching
for eight years, taking his PGDE six years later.

d Stephanie: Stephanie also did not enjoy English at school, but developed an interest in the
later years of secondary school, when she started to read and watch films and joined the

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272 Language Teaching Research 14(3)

school drama club. In Form 6 she studied English Literature and at university she majored
in English and Chinese. Before graduation Stephanie applied for several jobs, including
newspaper reporter and management trainee, but was interviewed only by schools. Her
first school was a primary school, where she taught Music and English. A year later she
began a part-time PGDE and moved to a secondary school, which she left after two years
due to the high workload and difficult students. She then joined her present school, where
she had been teaching both English and Chinese for three years at the time of interview.
The significance of these contrasting biographies is, first, that Mabel and Lucy had
enjoyed more stable careers and were employed in more academically oriented schools
than those in which Eric and Stephanie worked. Second, the interview data showed that
Lucy and Mabel were more strongly oriented towards teaching English as a subject than
Eric and Stephanie were. Whereas Lucy and Mabel focused many of their comments on
ways to improve their students’ language proficiency and enhance their motivation, Eric
adopted the view that teaching English was not the most important part of his job, argu-
ing that ‘we are not only transmitting knowledge, we are also trying to share what we
think, how they should lead their lives.’ He also took the view that it was important to
create space in English lessons to talk to students about things that were important to
them. Stephanie was also more oriented towards the personal development of her stu-
dents and focused her comments on making English lessons a more pleasant and mean-
ingful experience for them. She switched the textbook listening activities with
television-based activities, for example, not because she thought that the students would
learn more, but simply because they were more enjoyable.
These contrasts seem especially relevant to the four teachers’ attitudes towards the
Schemes of Work, which appear to have been far more authoritative documents in
Lucy’s and Mabel’s eyes. Interestingly, Lucy and Mabel also regarded their own expe-
riences of learning English and observation of teachers during their school days as the
most important influences on their teaching. In both cases this spilled over into the
uses they made of the spaces in the curriculum. Lucy, for example, had developed the
belief that it was important to enjoy learning English at an early age and used the time
that she saved on Scheme of Work tasks for enjoyable activities that would enhance
students’ motivation. Mabel had long believed that vocabulary was at the core of lan-
guage learning and spent a lot of the time she saved on vocabulary-building activities.
In contrast, Eric and Stephanie both reported that they had learned to teach English ‘on
the job’. Eric had supplemented learning from experience with reading in his early
years of teaching, while Stephanie emphasized how she had learned from friends and
colleagues. Their experiences of ‘learning by doing’ may have given them greater reli-
ance on their own capacity to decide what and how to teach, and a more distanced
attitude towards the systems of authority and surveillance in their schools. Their
emphasis on students’ personal development and making educational experiences as
pleasant as possible may reflect both the conditions in their schools and their less than
enthusiastic feelings about English lessons in their school days. The ways in which the
four teachers exercised their agency in relation to constraints on their autonomy as
teachers was, in other words, related to identities that they had developed over the
course of their language learning and teaching careers, which intertwined with the
contexts in which they were teaching in complex ways.

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Phil Benson 273

V  Conclusions
Returning to the research questions for this study, the evidence provided by the inter-
viewees indicates that day-to-day decisions about teaching and learning are mainly
determined by Schemes of Work that are drawn up in the school and based on the content
of commercial textbooks, which in turn reflect the content of system-wide English lan-
guage curriculum guidelines, syllabuses and public examinations. Schemes of Work and
the systems of supervision and surveillance that surround them are also the major con-
straint on teachers’ capacity to make their own decisions. These conclusions essentially
replicate Crookes’ (1997) picture of the Hawaiian state-school system as one in which
what and how teachers teach is mainly determined by what they are mandated to do,
although this study also points to the ways in which such systems are collaboratively
constructed through the involvement of teachers, parents and students. Although the
teachers interviewed in this study were critical of the ways in which English teaching
was organized, none of them believed that it was fundamentally wrong.
This study also suggests that the systems of constraint on teacher autonomy are by no
means monolithic. The teachers interviewed reported that they both found and created
spaces for autonomy, either by interpreting and manipulating the tasks specified in the
Schemes of Work or by ignoring them altogether. The ways in which teachers go about this
evidently varies according to the school context, but also according to identities constructed
over many years of learning and teaching in schools. This raises important questions about
teacher autonomy that deserve further research. Clearly, teacher autonomy is constrained
or facilitated by structural factors within schools and education systems, but it also depends
upon the interests and internal capacities of individual teachers. At this level teacher auton-
omy is necessarily related to individual biographies and identities, which influence both the
capacity and desire to create spaces for autonomy and what teachers decide to do with
them. This study was primarily designed to investigate structural constraints on teacher
autonomy, or why teachers seem to be unable to experiment with ideas from teacher educa-
tion programmes. In the event, it has posed much more complex questions concerning the
‘formative role’ that teachers play in the ‘wider social, cultural, and political processes’ that
inform day-to-day educational practice (Breen, 2007, p. 1068). These questions, in turn,
point to the need for further in-depth research on how the construction and reconstruction
of teacher identities in response to different situations and settings is woven into teachers’
capacity and desire for professional autonomy.
In spite of the teachers’ capacity to create spaces for autonomy, however, we would
still have to conclude that the system of decision-making in Hong Kong schools is not
one that supports experimentations with ideas from teacher education courses. Indeed,
the system appears to contain built-in mechanisms for resistance to innovation and
change that are liable to limit the impact of teacher education programmes. Interestingly,
this observation was reflected in the teachers’ own comments on the impact of their pro-
fessional training. Three of the four teachers said that they had learned very little at all
about teaching from their PGDE courses, and Lucy explained that this was largely
because the approaches and methods that she needed to use were specific to her school.
In this context, it is relevant to note that Hong Kong’s teacher education providers have
to some extent been charged with the responsibility for shifting primary and secondary

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274 Language Teaching Research 14(3)

school teaching in the direction of task-based learning. The impact of reform-oriented

teacher education initiatives of this kind is likely to be limited, however, both by restricted
opportunities for experimentation and teachers’ tendency to learn from previous experi-
ences within the system. One additional conclusion from this study is that teachers tend
to use the spaces they create not to experiment with new ideas, but to meet what they see
as the students’ needs. The needs that the teachers in this study identified, however,
largely reflected their own experiences and conceptions of what was important in lan-
guage learning. This suggests that one of the main reasons that teachers work to create
these spaces is to achieve a degree of professional satisfaction based on a sense that their
teaching is consonant with their deeply held beliefs.
While this paints a somewhat pessimistic picture of the prospects of teacher education
having an impact on state school systems, an alternative view might be that teacher educa-
tion courses may sometimes be too ambitious in what they hope to achieve. A familiar
in-service course scenario in Hong Kong, for example, involves the teacher educator
resisting teachers’ requests for model lesson plans on the grounds that the ideas introduced
in the course cannot be reduced to a single lesson. This scenario is also reflected in assign-
ments that ask teachers to plan units of teaching and learning rather than lessons. What
this study suggests is that a focus on the lesson may, in fact, be legitimate if the lesson is
the basic unit in which teachers have scope for experimentation. This is a complex issue,
because it is equally legitimate to argue that little can be done in a single lesson. Neverthe-
less, language teacher education may benefit from a greater sensitivity to the affordances
in teachers’ working conditions for teacher autonomy and experimentation.

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