An Empirical Study On College English Teachers' Professioanl Development

In the long development process of foreign language teaching and learning, the teacher is always the central figure. In recent years, with the consistent implementation of college English reforms, many experts and educators are placing more and more emphasis on the teachers'professional development, and made many fruitful achievements with Chinese characteristics. However, the focus of previous studies concentrated specifically on either excellent teachers or English teachers in general, with a gap in studies on college English teachers. Although college English teachers are a much larger group, less capable compare to English major teachers in educational background, academic atmosphere and research experiences, they also undertake the task and face the challenge of college English teaching reforms.With critical analysis on literature review of teacher's professional development theories at home and aboard, the author uses the Teacher's Reflective Cycle proposed by Wallace as the research framework, together with the perspectives on teacher's reflection proposed by Dewey and Sch?n, based on the college English teaching in a non-key university, to study the following three questions: 1) What is the status quo of teacher's professional development in non-key universities? 2) What influences do teachers'reflections exert on their teaching practice? And what are their gains and difficulties in this process? 3) How do reflections and teaching practice promote teachers'professional development?Both qualitative and quantitative research methods are adopted in this study. By employing the method of questionnaire, in-depth interviews, classroom observations and reflection journals, a one-year research on college English teachers'professional development was conducted in a non-key university. The objective of the questionnaire is to explore the correlation coefficient between teachers'self-development and their teaching practice. The findings indicate that all of the six variables have close correlation coefficient with teachers'behaviors in teaching reforms; namely, the beliefs in teaching reforms, self-competence and attitude, all kinds of academic exchange opportunities, self-improvement, reflection attitude and reflection cognition. Nevertheless, variables such as academic exchange opportunities and reflection attitude alone can only explain a portion of the teaching behaviors. Teachers need to apply what they have learned and what they have reflected upon to teaching practices, so as to continue their professional development. In order to further substantiate the questionnaire'findings, further details of teachers'professional development from the perspectives of their reflection and teaching practices are necessary. Therefore, further study were conducted on the nine teachers on the reasons behind the teachers'reflection and teaching practices, and find out the relationship between teachers'professional development and their teaching practice and reflection. The findings indicate that in addition to being beneficial development steps, both reflection and practice can help teachers find the problems in the teaching process and facilitate appropriate corrective measures. However, the width and depth of reflection are limited since the teachers'theoretical foundations are weak. Thus, systematic theoretical training is necessary and indispensable. Based on the above findings, taking the induction academic level, developmental tendency, in-sevice training of the teachers in non-key universities into consideration, the author also proposed the reflective model and the professional development model for college English teachers in China.The benefits of this study are two-fold: First, it has theoretical contributions to teachers'professional development theory by forming a new research perspective and dimension; second, the proposed new mode of teacher's professional development has practical implications for college English teachers in non-key universities in China and also provides empirical findings for teacher training projects, thus furthering college English reforms in China.