Exploring A Framework For Observing And Measuring Teacher Performance In A Comprehensive English Class

The present study investigates effective classroom observation and evaluation under China English Language Teaching contexts.The purpose of the study is twofold: 1)to extract a new classroom evaluation framework from a Comprehensive English teaching contest for evaluating effective English Language Teaching;2)to assess the applicability of the new framework in measuring teaching performance in a real Comprehensive English class.Sponsored by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press,the English Language Teaching Advisory Board annually holds National Foreign Language Teaching Contest,which provides great insights on effective Comprehensive English teaching and classroom evaluation.The present study adopts a mixed-method design and conducts both quantitative and qualitative content analysis on the experts’ comments on the contestants’ teaching performance in the third,fourth,and fifth Contest.The purpose of doing so is to figure out from what domains and dimensions the experts observe and measure teacher performance,which offer foundations for extracting a new framework for Comprehensive English classroom observation and evaluation.The results of the content analyses reveal that the experts identify effective Comprehensive English teaching mainly from five domains: setting teaching objectives;lesson structure and content;measures for organizing teaching;classroom interaction;and teachers’ comprehensive quality,among which the lesson structure and content domain catches the most attention.Based on these results,a new framework for observing and evaluating Comprehensive English teaching was preliminarily developed and further evaluated by three English education professors in the form of semi-structured interviews.The framework evaluation results reported that most of the domains and dimensions of Comprehensive English teacher performance in the framework were interrelated and representative.In addition,it was believed that the framework could function as basic guidance for classroom observation and evaluation on Comprehensive English teaching.Besides,the professors put forward suggestions for revising some problematic details in the framework,in accordance with which the researcher eventually proposed a revised framework for observing and evaluating Comprehensive English teaching.The revised framework describes concrete domains and dimensions for identifying effective teacher performance,which can be employed to guide t he development of classroom observation tools.Meanwhile,it also provides some pedagogical implications for improving the quality of Comprehensive English teaching.