Russian language teachers’ professional agency against the backdrop of the New National Teaching Quality Standards in China: an ecological perspective

ABSTRACT With the ‘New National Teaching Quality Standards’ and its supplement – the ‘Guide for the Russian Majors Education’ as language education policies, this paper argues that these policies have constructed an ecological environment for Russian language teachers’ (RLTs) agency in China. The interpretive policy analysis, interviews and classroom observations of four RLTs help explore which environmental factors (the macro-system, exo-system, meso system and micro-system) impact their agency from an ecological perspective, and which factors are ignored by RLTs. The findings are: (1) (the ideology embodied in) these policies is (are) mandatory in terms of the vocabulary and text, and they set a macro (exo-) framework for and influence RLTs’ agency; (2) The meso system (universities) has the greatest impact on RLTs’ agency, which may access or deny the possibilities the macro-language policy may offer; (3) RLTs’ dispositions and the Russian language department constitute a potential micro-system, and the role of this sub-system in RLTs’ agency cannot be ignored. This study is of methodological, theoretical, and practical significance for research on the impact of language policy and planning (LPP) on the developmental environment for teachers of less-commonly-taught language in terms of LPP for the diversity of foreign language education.