An Investigation Of Professional Development Of EFL Teachers In Tf College Of SWUFE

Independent colleges (hereinafter as ICs), emerging with the enlargement of public higher education at the end of the20th century, represent a new educational system of higher education in China. With over10-year growth, ICs have made great contributions to the development of China’s higher education and been an indispensable part of it. However, the issue, lack of qualified teachers, has become the bottleneck for the future development on the part of the ICs in China. Therefore, professional development of teachers should be put at the top of the agenda for ICs’ sustainable development and their corresponding education reforms, but such a petition is confronted with thorny problems, such as lack of fund and administrators’, even teachers themselves’ attention.As China’s roles in global economy and international affairs have been improved to a desired extent, the society at large is in urgent need of a high-English-proficiency workforce in China. Nevertheless, a large proportion of college graduates’ English proficiency, the amount of college EFL teachers and their teaching competence have fallen short of the expectations of the society and the business sectors. This situation is even worse among ICs. The national college English reforms demand highly for college English teaching, and thus require teachers to make conscientious self-improvement, which has become the focus of EFL education in the new century.As a typical independent college in Sichuan province, TF College of SWUFE attaches great importance to English teaching and learning, and has carried out a variety of educational reforms in order to seek its own distinctive path. Since quality education is the foundation of school development, EFL teachers’ development deserves full attention, because EFL teachers play a vital role in improving the quality of English education and the implementation of educational and school-based reforms. The present program reviews the relevant theories and researches on EFL teachers’ professional development (PD) and college teacher development from home and abroad, and then points out the necessity and feasibility of promoting EFL teachers’ PD in independent colleges. After that comes the investigation of49full-time EFL teachers’ teaching and scientific research, their development environment, status quo and needs for PD through questionnaires and interviews. Based on the results of the investigation into PD of EFL teachers in TF College, using the combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, the present study aims to analyze the ingrained reasons and thus offer effective countermeasures suitable for this college. The author hopes that the study would provide certain references for EFL teachers’development of other independent colleges in Sichuan province.The survey illustrates that at TF College:first, young teachers with limited teaching experience take up a large proportion of all the full-time EFL teachers. Although most of them hold Master’s degree, more than half of them are assistants except for two associate professors; second, working environment is not favorable, which leads to teachers’low sense of belonging and lots of transient teachers; third, many of them do not have much sense or ability of autonomous development; capacity of conducting research is considered by the majority of teachers to be not so useful in PD and research has not been commonly undertaken by them, meanwhile, the cooperation among colleagues is insufficient; fourth, teachers can not fully shift educational ideas introduced by the school into their teaching activities, for the related trainings and seminars are seldom organized by the school and the sections in particular, and teachers do have many puzzles; fifth, teachers hold strong demand for professional development and their proclaimed needs vary, but there is a huge gap between needs and opportunities, further, development environment and mechanisms are not positive or effective enough; sixth, there is no short-term or long-term plan for teachers’development in English teaching and research sections and it is badly in need of pacemakers.On the basis of the above-mentioned study of theory and investigation and considering the characteristics of independent colleges, this thesis advances some practical approaches to promote EFL teacher’s professional development of this college in the respects of the government, the school, leaders and teachers themselves. In the end, the author proposes to set up a Center for EFL Teacher Development, a long-term service-oriented organization, which is fully responsible for EFL teachers’ development at this college.