Teaching Competencies of Language Teachers in Research Universities in Beijing: Perspectives from Sotl and Institutional Theory

---

sustainability
Article
Teaching Competencies of Language Teachers in Research
Universities in Beijing: Perspectives from SoTL and
Institutional Theory
Yi Zhang
1,2,
* , Fugui Ye
1
and Xiumei Liu
2







Citation:
Zhang, Y.; Ye, F.; Liu, X.
Teaching Competencies of Language
Teachers in Research Universities in
Beijing: Perspectives from SoTL and
Institutional Theory. Sustainability
2021
, 13, 4943. https://doi.org/
10.3390/su13094943
Academic Editors: Jordi
Colomer Feliu and Naomi
T. Krogman
Received: 24 February 2021
Accepted: 25 April 2021
Published: 28 April 2021
Publisher’s Note:
MDPI stays neutral
with regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional affil-
iations.
Copyright:
© 2021 by the authors.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
1
Institute of Education, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China; [e-mail]
2
Department of Foreign Languages, School of Law and Humanities,
China University of Mining and Technology, Beijing 100083, China; [e-mail]
*
Correspondence: [e-mail]; Tel.: [phone]
Abstract:
Though professional development of language teachers has received increasing attention
over the past decade, there is a lack of research on development of language teachers’ teaching
competencies in research universities. Informed by the institutional perspective and the framework
of Scholarship of Teaching, this study investigates the development of 16 language teachers’ teaching
competencies in Beijing research universities. The findings show that language teachers’ teach-
ing competencies include English proficiency, professional ethics, pedagogical content knowledge,
reflective thinking, and research-informed teaching. Factors influencing language teachers’ teach-
ing competencies range from the department level to the university level and the academia level.
Pathways are proposed from the cultural-cognitive perspective, the normative perspective, and the
regulative perspective to develop teaching competencies of language teachers.