An Exploration Of College EFL Teaching Through Action Research: Theory And Practice

During the process of implementing New Curriculum, college EFL teachers are facing many challenges. It is difficult for teachers to solve this problem through the traditional way of "passing on truth, imparting knowledge and solving problems." It is advocated that teachers are supposed to be "teachers-as-researchers" who are capable of conducting research while teaching. However, teachers find that traditional educational research always leads to the separation of theory from practice and research from teaching. As a new way of research with teachers' participation, Action Research (AR) , which integrates research into teaching, encourages teachers to generate their own educational theories and to achieve self-professional development in the course of continuously improving teaching practice. Therefore, it is regarded as one of the best ways of research with teachers' participation in EFL teaching and research. However, a few of the kind can be found on the exploration of its theoretical basis and its implications to integrated English classroom at secondary vocational college.Besides the exploration of AR's theoretical basis-critical theory , constructivism and living educational theory-from the perspectives of philosophy, cognitive psychology and education, this paper also presents a mini-AR project with a focus on how to improve teacher-student interactions in college integrated English classroom, which serves to demonstrate how AR can help the teacher, taking the self as source, solve classroom problem so as to have a better understanding of language teaching practice and to realize self-professional development.This study, lasting for 18 weeks, involves 50 sophomores majoring in Journalism and Compilation at Hunan Mass Media College as the participants. In this study, priority was given to qualitative study as the main approach to get information through the means of interview, observation, students' diary and teacher's log. Meanwhile, to ensure the objectivity of the final results, we also used quantitative study by employing two sets of questionnaires which were designed to make a comparative analysis about the changes of both the teacher and the students before and after AR.Both qualitative and quantitative analyses have enabled this author to conclude that AR helps promote teacher-student interactions in the EFL classroom successfully, and that AR also is an effective way for teachers to diversify teachers' roles, to improve teaching effectiveness, and to realize self-professional development. Suggestions are also put forward for the expansion of AR among college EFL teachers in China.