Dear Cao Yong

I congratulate on such an excellent study. It is detailed, insightful and has a global relevance for teacher researchers. Your abstract is well considered and reflects a deep understanding of language learning processes. In my opinion, it is your personal biography that brings your account to life. Could you include some photographs in the text to enable me to share your perceptions and your educational context? could you photograph yourself teaching with your students so I can 'be present' in your classroom?

I welcome your insightful comments about language learning using the traditional grammar translation approach - your points resonate with my own experience as a teacher of French and Spanish in schools for over twenty years. Why not contextualise your comments in a critical review of appropriate literature - you can access this through the Internet.

Your comments that students' pronunciation is weak and that students have difficulty applying the language rules they learn in school - I find that enabling students to deduct the rules for language use while they are acquiring language in real life situations is a useful strategy - some students benefit more than others from discrete rule teaching.

You are helping me to appreciate the needs of China in the 21st Century by highlighting the nation's previous deficit of a literate workforce. What an exciting time you are living through in China with an openness to new ways of learning and a valuing of language as a way to living a productive life! Your research has never been so important.

Your writing perhaps more than any other I have so far engaged with, brings me to an awareness of the problems that language teachers are currently facing in China.

While I agree that good pronunciation is essential for good communication, I wonder how far an emphasis on pronunciation might enable or impede communication of ideas by some students. Perhaps we have to allow students to voice language that is less that perfectly pronounced sometimes to enable them to communicate their thoughts?

I believe you have voiced profoundly important insights into how language learning might be improved and reasons why (relating to tonal and intonal considerations) this is particularly challenging for some students. I sense your wonderful enthusiasm on encountering action research but I encourage you to explicate how this approach 'constitutes wings' for you. Why does Jack Whitehead/Jean McNiff's concept of action research appeal more than other types of action research that you have encountered?

typo suitable not suiutable

formatting - some double spacing where single seems more appropriate

I congratulate you on your critical engagement with literature (Zongyan, Anthony, Brown, et al) to contextualise and illuminate arguments you put forward in your research.

Your own research is well contextualised in terms of the new Curriculum in China with its emphasis on the four language skills. There has been much debate in the UK where teachers feel that these skills should not be taught separately because communication requires an interaction between each of these skills - what is your opinion about this?

How about using video to record students' use of English - enable them to video one another too, so they can assist you in identifying which aspects of their pronunciation need more attention in order to improve - you could video say once a month to evidence any claim that they are improving ...

I would like to see more of your writing in future and hope you will move into co-enquiry with your students and colleagues. Sometimes despite your obvious desire to make your lessons less teacher led and more student focused, I suspect you might be living a contradiction - where you have professional values may not quite be realised in practice.

I sense this through your use of predominant use of 'I' rather than 'we' - though I do see evidence in you writing of peer support and peer review - can you explicate this?
Jack Whitehead has written widely about challenges in realising you are a living contradiction - you can access our paper called The Look of the Teacher at this address:

http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/multi.shtml

You have written an amazingly detailed and coherent account of what happens in your classroom, so detailed in places that it may be preferable to create an appendix

Thank you so much, Cao Yong, for enabling me to gain insights into your expertise as a language teacher and to share perceptions of the challenges you face as a teacher. I strongly suggest you prepare this paper for possible publication in the JALT journal that is published in Japan and you also consider writing a paper for ALL's Language Learning Journal.

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