A Study On Teacher Knowledge In The Context Of CBI Curriculum Reform

Over the last decades there has been a general tendency in language teaching focusing on teaching language as a real tool to communicate. As a direct consequence of this trend, content-based instruction(hereafter referred to as CBI) has becomeincreasingly popular as a means of developing linguistic ability in a great variety of educational contexts. CBI is a method of teachingsecond/foreign languages that integrates language instruction with the teaching of subject matter. CBI has been accepted as one of the most representative contributions to contemporary second/foreign language pedagogy. So far, Chinese scholars have already done preliminary research on the feasibility of CBI in China, and relevant teaching results also found out that CBI has a positive influence on students’ content acquirement and skill improvement. However, these researchwere mostly concerning students’ part on their linguistic competence, disciplinary content, learning strategy and motivation, neglecting the other critical factor-“teacher”- to a certain degree. This study focuses on teacher knowledge, which is the basement of teacher professional development, trying to explore teacher knowledge among teachers teaching non-English-major postgraduates, from the perspectives of current “teacher knowledge” situation, the origin and the characteristics of such “teacher knowledge”.The subjects of this study were four postgraduate English teachers from School of Foreign Languages and Literature at an university. The research was based on teacher knowledge framework and classification of Shulman(1987). Research instruments used included:“classroom observation” and “semi-structured interview”. Classroom observation was conducted using a modified version of classroom observation scale on teacher knowledge. Data collected from classroom observation scale was analyzed through SPSS11.0. Recordings of semi-structured interviews were transcribed and analyzed. The study results indicate that teacher knowledge is not evenly distributed. “General knowledge” and “knowledge of students and their characteristics” account for more portions of overall teaching knowledge than “content knowledge” and “pedagogical content knowledge” do. Moreover, the origin of teacher knowledge is of less variety and limited. Teachers’ “content knowledge” and “pedagogical knowledge” mainly come from reading relevant professional literature.At last, according to the research results, suggestions to CBI teachers and administrators were offered. To some extent, the research findings from this study may play a role of reference in terms of CBI to postgraduate English teaching.