Cooperative Learning: An Effective Approach To Accelerate The Professional Development Of Foreign Language Teachers Of High Vocational Education

With the deepening of foreign language education reform of high vocational education in China, people begin to pay more attention to the importance of students' abilities to apply English and require the teachers to improve themselves. The current situation of professional development of foreign language teachers of high vocational education is not satisfactory and cannot meet the requirements of the teaching target. They are lacking in professional knowledge and effective cooperative learning.In view of this situation, the thesis makes the theoretical study of connotation of professional development of foreign language teachers of high vocational education. It consists of five aspects: emotional attitude, professional knowledge, the self-development awareness and need, vocational morality.Nowadays there are three perspectives of teacher professional development: intellectual perspectives, through training; practical-reflective perspectives, through personal or cooperative reflection; ecological perspectives, through cooperative teacher cultures. According to the situation of high vocational colleges, it's not realistic for teachers to improve their professional development only by training or reflection. With the idea of school-based teachers' development, cooperative learning has become the most effective approach of teacher's professional development.Cooperative learning is good for teacher's professional development: helpful to form their promises to work, a good means to construct their knowledge and develop their skills, good for training the needs and awareness of developing by themselves, useful to set up a new faith of English teaching and enhance the vocational morality.In order to form a cooperative atmosphere and a scene of helping each other and developing together, we should rely on the following aspects: establishing the cooperative team, confirming the common target, making sure the negotiation approach, creating the scene of cooperation, improving the self-reflect in cooperation. There are some different ways of cooperative learning: cooperative learning among the teachers, between teacher and student. And provides some measures to ensure the cooperative learning to be effective: forming cooperative culture of teachers, providing sufficient supports for cooperative learning, founding inspiring policies.The last part is concluding remarks. The author makes a summary and states the main viewpoints briefly, and then points out that a few questions remain to be solved in the future.