This is the first of two reports on a project that tried to
find examples of inspiring English teaching in the state
school systems of Guangzhou, China and Jakarta,
Indonesia. The project’s rationale was to expand our
understanding of what makes language teaching
motivating, especially what inspires long-term
individual effort to learn the language in developing
country contexts where official provision is limited in
terms of time, resources and quality assurance.
In this report we focus on the responses to an online
survey that asked learners to nominate a teacher they
had had in school who had inspired them, to describe
their teaching and to tell us what it had inspired them
to do. Some 279 valid responses were obtained, and
163 different teachers were nominated, some of them
many times by different learners.
The inspiring teachers were said by learners to
have a range of different qualities, with personal
and professional virtues proving just as important
as methodological competence or innovation. Some
intriguing differences were found in the preferences
of Chinese and Indonesian learners. Although inspiring
teaching may be quite rare, it can have long-term
effects on learners, generating interest, a sense of
progress, and a desire to invest more effort into
learning outside the classroom. These benefits may