ABSTRACT
The Ministry of Education of China has established English as a compulsory subject for all elementary students from Grade Three upwards since 2003 (Ministry of Education of China, 2002). However, there is a huge rural-urban divide in primary English education in China due to the lack of English teachers, especially in the less developed regions in western China (Gong, 2011; Zhang, 2012). In order to alleviate the issue, Chinese educational non-profit organizations have recently increasingly started to build e-learning programs which recruit voluntary online teachers to teach for rural schools.
This ethnographic case study explores an online teacher’s beliefs about English teaching for rural students in a supplementary English e-learning class built by a Chinese non-profit organization. Thematic analysis (Cresswell, 2013) of data from online and onsite class observations and semi-structured interviews show that the online English teacher’s beliefs about rural students’ learning challenges, the facilitating teacher’s role, and her own role in online teaching, shape her pedagogical decisions and her interactions with the rural students and the local teacher.
