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A Study Of Applied Reflective Teaching In Pre-vocation Internship For College English Teachers

Posted on:2012-05-03Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:J H GuoFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155330332998388Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
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English has been one of the major parts of the national curriculum among the whole world. As a compulsory education in China, English has been emphasized on for a long time in most schools, especially middle school and colleges. Teachers play an important role in the teaching practice. And teacher development is increasingly drawing attention of scholars home and abroad. However the contents in most teacher-training programs can not literately meet the professional needs of teachers. Their primary focus always lies in the input of knowledge and skills to improve the teachers'language proficiency and enrich their teaching skills. Nevertheless what language teachers need is far beyond all mentioned above; they anticipate to grasping more about the up-dated trends of education, the educational reforms, teaching methodologies even research approaches etc. Therefore the new training programs are expected to resolve problems teachers meet with in their teaching practice and guide them to undertake effective teaching process in the practical classroom.Recently a large number of researches on reflective teaching have been conducted and it is considered as an efficient way to promote teacher development. Generally speaking, the notion of reflective teaching derives from Dewey's (1993) concept of reflective action. From his standpoint, it involves a willingness to commit to continuous self-appraisal and development. As far as the reflecting teaching is concerned, different scholars hold different perspectives. According to the definitions of reflective teaching, different scholars hold different opinions. Some are in the opinion that reflective teaching is "the teacher's thinking about what happens in classroom lessons, and thinking about alternative means of achieving goals or aims". Some think that the development of teaching techniques is viewed as the most vital means for assisting teachers to improve their practice. Then reflective teaching is treated as a way to provide teachers with an opportunity to conceive the teaching event deeply, analytically and objectively.A number of previous researches of reflective teaching have just focused on the development of practical teachers, esp. university teachers. In order to prove the real impact of the reflective teaching in the apprentice teachers who are undergraduates in the university, a study was conducted and the results were collected and discussed in the thesis. The author has collected some study and research concerning about reflective teaching and ESL/EFL teacher development both at home and abroad from different resources. It includes theories and works in educational psychology, applied linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and on-line resources from digital library of Ji Lin University, by which we can access to a great many database at home and abroad such as CNKI of China, ProQuest, EBSCO host, ERIC, and Google, where the author has got to many classic and fresh on-line resources of education, and Ph. D dissertations, M. A. thesis of all kinds of information as well. Having read critically and thought deeply, the author is keen on the theme of implementing reflective teaching in university teaching practice to promote apprentice teacher development. In the research the subjects were six apprentice teachers who were majoring in English in their senior year from School of Foreign Languages, North East Normal University and did their internship for teaching practice in No.68 Middle School September 1st,2010 to October 1st,2010. With apprentice teacher interviews and observation as data collection instruments, the research try to figure out whether reflective teaching can help student teacher development or not and how to guide student teachers to reflect critically. Research suggests that the supervised reflective teaching experience allows the future teachers to try different teaching styles and guide their own role as a teacher, in order to meet the needs of different students, to develop classroom management skills, to link assessment to instruction and to become reflective practitioners. And it also suggests that apprentice teachers have improved themselves in lesson analysis and classroom control and other aspects required in teaching after the internship. This paper proves that collaborative action research and video recording are the reflective approaches that fit the apprentice teachers' reflection well. And in the reflective process of undertaking in collaborative action research and video recording, apprentice-teacher development is promoted and facilitated. While some hindrances that debilitate apprentice-teacher development and the reflective effects may occur in collaborative action research and video recording. The research with the hindrances the apprentice teachers' reflective teaching is needed and will pave a way to promote apprentice-teacher development more efficiently and better.
Keywords/Search Tags:reflective teaching, teacher development, apprentice teacher
PDF Full Text Request
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