A Comparative Study Of English Teachers' Online Collaborative Reflection

The rapid development of computer-mediated communication technology provides a great chance for teachers' collaborative reflection, and it becomes the new way for teachers' reflection. The research of the teachers' online collaborative reflection abroad is mainly about pre-service teachers, and at home the research is not much enough. So the present study selected Cambridge English Teacher Online Professional Development abroad and Xin Si Kao Chinese Education Resources Service at home as the research settings to explore English teachers' online collaboration reflection content, online collaborative reflection level and collaboration features from the perspective of social network. The study aims at providing the enlightenment and reference for teachers' online collaborative reflection at home.The study includes six chapters. Chapter one mainly introduces the research background, research objective and research significance. Chapter two is literature review. Chapter three is the theoretical framework, including the social culture theory and transformative theory. Chapter four illustrates the research design. Firstly, the researchers revise The Framework of Topic Category of Reflection developed by Ho and Richards(1993) to analyze teachers' collaborative reflection content. Secondly, according to Three Stage Developmental Model of Teacher Reflection(Crotty, 2001), the researchers analyze teachers' collaborative reflection level. Thirdly, software Ucinet 6.186 is used to analyze the teachers' collaborative features.According to the results in chapter five:(1) about the collaborative reflection content, the teachers pay more attention to the teaching skills and strategies on two forums. On forum at home, the teachers prefer to talk about the examination, curriculum reform, educational news and policies and hot issues; on forum abroad, the teachers pay more attention to the instructional technology, the usage of corpora.(2) About the collaborative reflection level, on both of the forums, the teachers' online collaborative reflection level is mostly at the beginner reflective stage, and Beginner-knowledge takes a big part, that is to say, most part of the teachers are good at describing the artifact and evidence. On forum at home, it is the intermediate stage that accounts the second most frequent part on reflective level, and Intermediate-knowledge takes the biggest part at this stage, which means the teachers are good at giving their new understandings about an issue; while on forum abroad, it is the expert stage that takes the second most frequent part on reflective level, and Expert-application is the biggest part at this stage, which demonstrates the experts assist and mentor teachers on the practice.(3) On forum at home, the number of teachers involved in the discussions is small, but relatively they have a closer and more stable relation with each other; on forum abroad, there are more teachers, but the density of communication is not high, the teachers discuss more with expert. There are more consultants on forum abroad than on forum at home.The enlightenment for the future teachers' collaborative reflection is:(1) the topic should be more reasonable and complete;(2) there should be related technicians providing technical support;(3) more consultants should be invited to participate in the discussion.