Foreign Language Teachers' Professional Development Theory And Empirical Research

With more emphasis on foreign language teaching in education field, foreign language teacher education becomes to be one of the focuses of such studies. Thus, the topic on foreign language teacher professional development turns out to be the central one, for which concerns the national foreign language education strategies, such as policy planning, education goals setting, syllabus revision, curriculum design, textbook writing, methods implementation, and foreign language teacher training and certification standards, etc. Obviously, such research is very complicated and important in foreign language education in China.This paper is about the theoretical and quantitative research on foreign language teacher professional development from different perspectives and with scientific methods. Based on literature review, the fundamental trend of foreign language teacher professional developmenttheory seems easy to find out, and the hypotheses--"tool" and "subject" psychologicalorientations in teacher professional development have also been put forward. Guided by the theoretical hypotheses, we design a questionnaire about teachers' attitude toward their own professional development and distribute them to almost 300 foreign language teachers at middle schools in many provinces. Having collected the data, we do some statistic analysis on them by means of SPSS8.0 software. As expected, the conclusions drawn from the experiment correspond to our previous research hypotheses.And as for the practice in teacher professional development field, there exists such a phenomenon, namely external teacher education system is not in conform to the teachers' internal psychological development. Therefore, we hope learning organization theory in human resources can realize the integrality of the above two development systems. Especially, team learning, as one of the modern management forms and ideas, can develop human resources in the innovation activities to push foreign language teacher development.This dissertation embodies significance in theoretical and practical dimensions: (1) In terns of theoretical significance, we do the literature review about general teacher professional development (especially for foreign language teachers) from the historical and international angles. Based on our literature collection and analysis work, other researchers can begin their further relevant studies with reference to our proposed ideas. (2) In terms of practical significance, setting up foreign language teachers learning organization at middle schools is the practical exploration to better teachers' professional development measures and quality. Under the current degree education and the professional title system, learning organization theory becomes one of the effective measures to reinforce teachers self-consciousness of their development while they are in the course of "tool" professional development. Therefore, we believe learning organization not only plays an important role in foreign language teacher professional development at middle schools, but also in all teachers professional development who are in other subjects at schools at different levels.