Middle School English Pre-service Teachers' Professional Knowledge Construction

The English teacher quality is a key factor in the success or failure of English education. However, it has been proved that the lack of qualified English teachers has become a bottleneck of our country's fundamental English education development, which arouses wide attention in the academic and educational circle. Of that issue, the construction of English teacher professional knowledge is a focus, for the teacher professional knowledge decides the teaching practice level, and relates to the English teaching quality and teacher professional development. The present study is focused on the construction of secondary-school pre-service English teacher professional knowledge (CSPETPK), because well begun half done; therefore, as the origin of the secondary-school English teachers'career, CSPETPK will influence the teacher professional knowledge development directly.As for CSPETPK, the present study has done the following work: first, the related concepts have been compared by literature review, which lays a theoretical foundation for the hypothesis, research object, content, category, tools and methods of the empirical study. Second, based on Richards'definition of the content and category of the foreign language teacher professional knowledge, the study investigates and analyzes how pre-service secondary-school teachers in Shanghai construct their professional knowledge and its causes of formation by combining both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Third, the detailed core mechanism and scheme for the construction of the pre-service secondary-school English teacher professional knowledge has been discussed and put forward on the basis of the theoretical and empirical study.With literature review, this paper expounds some concerned concepts step by step: the domestic and foreign definitions of pre-service teacher and normal school student; the relationship and characteristics of the general teacher professional knowledge, English teacher professional knowledge and pre-service English teacher professional knowledge. The content and category put forward by Richards on the foreign language teacher professional knowledge has been compared with the teacher knowledge structure requirement of Chinese fundamental English curriculum standard to summarize the content and category of CSPETPK. The object of the empirical study has been determined with the needs analysis theory. It involves not only the normal school undergraduates at different stages, but also the related pre-service teacher educators and the employing units. According to the philosophical feature of knowledge classification, for the pre-service English teachers, two kinds of developing trend in professional knowledge construction—"cognitive knowledge development"and"practical knowledge development", have been proposed as the hypothesis for the empirical study.The findings from the empirical study reveals that (1) there are two kinds of developing trend on CSPETPK—"practical knowledge development"and"cognitive knowledge development". It has been proved that the practical knowledge development follows the cognitive knowledge development, while the need of the practical knowledge development exceeds that of the cognitive knowledge development. This phenomenon reveals a fact, namely the present knowledge construction is not in conformity with the pre-service teachers'need. Therefore, it is urgent to strengthen the practical knowledge construction. (2) The causes of the above fact are as follows: the unbalance of pre-service teacher education program course setting; the one fold implementation of courses, namely knowledge learnt in a passive way; a self-contradiction between ideology and action among pre-service teachers and teacher educators.Based on the findings and the theories as well as the precondition that it is not possible to change the present pre-service teacher education system and syllabus, this study puts forward the subjective learning of pre-service English teacher (SLPET) as a core mechanism of professional knowledge construction. The implication of SLPET is that pre-service teachers must carry out their subjective learning on the basis of their individual"teacher"identity; meanwhile, the teacher educators must conduct their courses on the basis of pre-service teachers'"teacher"identity to make pre-service teachers always on an active learning process. The SLEPT includes the content as follows: (1) change the traditional mode of the practical knowledge acquirement only by eight-week teaching practice to a long-term mechanism, that is, to integrate the teaching links of the four-year preservice teacher education program courses and to develop the corresponding course activities. (2) According to the knowledge developing feature and course character, different schemes of subjective learning have been made for the courses before, during and after the teaching practice.