An Investigation Of Humanistic Qualities For Full-time English MED Students

The world nowadays has stepped into the fast-developing 21st century in the wake of globalization in economy,technology and many other aspects.The pursuit of high efficiency has become a popular trend and it has influenced the education field as well as the pre-service English teacher education program.Both higher education and secondary education are somewhat featured by utilitarianism and pragmatism.Luckily,education policymakers have paid attention to the lack of humanistic qualities of the education receivers and began to pay full attention to it.Given that the cultivation of humanistic qualities is of vital importance for postgraduate education(Fan,2009;Gu&Jia,2004),and present researches on humanistic qualities mainly focus on middle school or college students,the research thus set its aim on investigating the humanistic qualities of postgraduates,and to be specific,the full-time English master of education degree(MED)students.In this study,the research combines the qualitative research method and quantitative method and using the tool of the questionnaire,interview,and classroom observation to collect the data.The study is centered on the following three research questions:1.What are the attitudes towards humanistic qualities as perceived by full-time English MED students and teacher educators?2.What humanistic qualities are required to be improved for full-time English MED students?3.What are the factors that might affect full-time English MED students’ humanistic qualities and how to improve that?After a questionnaire survey,interview,and analyzing the data by Statistical Product and Service Solutions 19.0(SPSS 19.0)and EXCEL,the major findings of the study can be summarized as follows:1.The majority of the participants hold quite a positive and favorable attitude towards the humanistic qualities.And they show a strong agreement towards its position in the teacher preparation program and the position towards their personal development.2.In general,the overall humanistic qualities of the full-time English MED students are good as perceived by themselves,while there are still some shortcomings in the aspect of caring,respecting,motivating,interacting with students and their personal traits aspects,such as lacking the ability to put theory into practice,shortage of guidance and support in improve humanistic qualities,and a lack of corresponding environment for humanistic edification.3.Factors that might impact the full-time English MED students’ humanistic qualities can be mainly concluded in three aspects:the unreasonable course arrangement,less help and support from the teaching staff,and lack of or inaccurate efforts in mainstream culture and value infiltration.The results of this study will hopefully provide a good reference for the adjustment of the teacher training program,curriculum setting,professional development as wells as formal and informal classroom teaching of full-time education masters in English.