A Study Of The Perception Of The In-service English Teachers On Their Pre-service Curriculum And Instruction

Nowadays the professional development of the in-service teachers, consists of the main part of teacher education and has gained more and more attention. Workshops, conferences, collaborating learning and courses in summer or winter holiday are all different forms to promote the on-going development of in-service teachers and these all are indeed very important. However, it has to be pointed out the pre-service stage of the in-service teachers is in fact concerned with how well they can do as practitioners not only at the beginning when they enter the teaching field, but also how well they could possibly develop after they become teachers. After all, the pre-service stage when they were undergraduates lays the foundation of how to be a qualified teacher in the future. Therefore, rather than only focusing on the professional development of the in-service teachers, it is advisable to have an in-depth study of how the in-service teachers perceive their pre-service education, concerned with the curriculum and instruction that they have ever received. And their perceptions can surely provide some references of how the k-12 classroom teachers should be cultivated, in which aspects reforms are needed to conduct, for the in-service teachers have already been the practitioners and they are supposed to have their perspectives of how they have benefited from their pre-service programs and of how they think the pre-service programs could be better developed so that they will not feel inadequate when performing the role as a teacher. The case is also the same with the pre-service English program. This study intends to investigate the perceptions of the in-service English teachers so that, with the collected data, reasonable suggestions can be made to the universities and colleges which shoulder the responsibility of cultivating the pre-service English teachers.The researcher used questionnaire and interview to collect data from the in-service teachers on the research topic.The study finds that, although most in-service teachers claim that their college curriculum and instruction are good, there are still some problems that should be solved. Specially, some colleges lack the teachers’ professional skills training while in others, the curriculum designed might not be convenient to broaden the students’ knowledge and the plan of the curriculum pays too much attention to the training of language knowledge and ignores the spreading of the pedagogical theories. Accordingly, many in-service teachers gave suggestions of how to improve the pre-service teachers’ curriculum and instruction, including setting up more practical courses for the pre-service teachers, integrating the curriculum, adding some courses about language skills to the curriculum to strengthen students’ ability of language using and so on. All these feedbacks do good to the curriculum development and instruction of pre-service English programs.