A Case Study Of High School English Teachers' Subject Knowledge Under The Framework Of Subject Core Literacy

A country to be strong must strengthen its education,and education to be strengthened must develop its teachers.Being a teacher is a specialized profession and teachers’ previous knowledge,to a large extent,dominates their educational and teaching performance.As such,Pedagogical Content Knowledge(shortened as PCK)is the core of their previous knowledge.And now,when the core competence of English subject is advanced,English teachers have new criteria to evaluate their own subject content knowledge,with further requirements for them to acquire PCK and more rational suggestions to its application in practice.Therefore,it is highly necessary to study English teachers’ understanding and application of their English subject content knowledge.This study,with Mr.A,a senior English teacher in a high school affiliated to a normal university in Shandong Province,as the object of study,adopting the methods of semi-structured interview,questionnaire and inductive analysis,attempted to investigate how senior high school English teachers understood and applied their Pedagogical Content Knowledge in practice.The aim of the study was to reveal the current real situation of their understanding and application of PCK,within the framework of the core competence of English subject,so as to help to construct a highly efficient English teaching class,where senior high school English learners are overall developed in terms of their English core competence.The final research results showed that senior high school English teachers had a comprehensive and profound understanding of curriculum knowledge,being rather proficient in its application,but they still had a long way to go to reach the requirement of the English subject core competence in cultivating students’ linguistic ability.Their understanding of students’ knowledge was in line with learners’ learning situation,and their application of this kind of knowledge was quite reasonable,conforming well to the requirements of the English subject core competence.In terms of knowledge of teaching strategies,English teachers had a profound understanding and proficient application.Their classroom teaching,however,was still featured by explanation,being far from the requirements of the core competence.As for knowledge of assessment,teachers had ignored the dimension of emotion,attitude and value.Although their application of assessment was rather flexible,teachers evaluated their students’ performance in quiet a one-sided way,which did not fullymeet the requirements of English subject core competence.In a word,high school English teachers,represented by Mr.A,had a comprehensive understanding of Pedagogical Content Knowledge and could rationally put it into practice,but they were inadequate in both of their understanding and application of PCK,having not completely reached the requirements of the English core competency.Due to the limitation of time and conditions,this study does have some deficiencies,such as the small number of subjects and the simple research methods.In spite of this,this study,based on the urgent need to enrich teachers’ subject teaching knowledge guided by the core competence framework,has basically achieved its objectives and has made a detailed analysis of Mr.A’s understanding and application of subject teaching knowledge in his class.It also serves as a valuable example for the future research on teachers’ subject teaching knowledge within the framework of core competence.