A Study Of College English Teachers' Collaborative Learning In A Project-based Learning Community

With the enactment of the Guidelines for College English Teaching (2014, Draft Version), college English teaching reforms are in full swing in universities. Teacher'quality and ability are the key factors affecting teaching, which lay higher requirements for college English teachers. The Guidelines point out that college English teachers should learn and participate actively in various kinds of learning communities, cooperate and collaborate with colleagues to achieve professional development. Therefore, joining project-based learning community to learn collaboratively has been a new trend for teacher personal and professional development.In the context of college English teaching reforms, this paper intends to explore college English teachers'collaborative learning in the project-based learning community (a coursebook-editing group in H. University). Given the importance of collaborative learning and project-based learning community, the study aims to explore two questions:1) Does collaborative learning exist in the project-based learning community? If so, how many categories and forms of collaborative learning are there in the community? 2) Is the collaborative learning frequently used in the project-based leaning community? If so, what influence does it bring to teachers'professional development?Qualitative method is applied in this study. Under a natural context, the author took various instruments like group meeting, online qq chatting and offline discussions to analyze the data inductively in terms of theme confirmation, categorization and item classification. The research materials are thirteen college English teachers'qq chat logs which were recorded for nearly two years. After the data analysis, the main findings are:1) The collaborative learning does exist and there are four categories (parallel, joint, covert and incidental) and eight forms of collaborative learning (emotional talk, task assignment, message delivery, atmosphere activation, knowledge sharing, policy-making, help-seeking and helping offering, and other talk) in the project-based learning community.2) Collaborative learning is frequently used. It has a great influence upon teachers'professional development in three dimensions of collaborative learning:domain of the influence of professional learning, capacity for autonomy and transformative practice and sphere of action. Meanwhile, the implications and limitations of the research and suggestions for future study are also presented in the paper.