A Research On Self-Directed Professional Development Of A Teacher Of TESOL For Further Study Learners

The concept of "Teacher Professionalization" (teaching as a profession) was formulated in 1960's by International Labour Organization and UNESCO. The successive decades witness a rapid rise to the attention to the teacher professional development as a strategic task and to its advances. At home, Zhong Qiquan (2000) states that teacher professionalization is a major theme for the current educational reform.Despite the abundant researches on the professional development undertaken at home, they are subject to two major limitations that these researches, predominantly presentation of those overseas literature review on the professional development, are of little service to the solution to specific problems in local teaching practices (Jin Meifu, 2004) , and that the conventional confinement of the research concerning teacher professional development to professional researchers and the isolation of the teachers from their own professional development are responsible for a deficiency of self-directed professional development researches with individual teacher as source.Accordingly, it is urgently imperative to call for more teachers' active commitment to their self-directed professional development. Based on inductive-inferential approach and narrative-analytic approach, this thesis is designed to observe and analyze a one-year programme for self-directed professional development of the author, a teacher of English for further education learners, with herself as source and critically reflective learning, reflective teaching and action research as the major procedures. It is recommended that teacher blogs might function as one of potential means for self-directed professional development. The result establishes the validity, reliability and feasibility of this programme for the individual teacher concerned and some certain implication for teacher education and training.In respect of specific significance and implications for theories and researches in teaching and professional development, the following implications are noted.First and foremost, the critically reflective learning of the relevant literature, in combination with action research and reflective teaching, two highly promoted educational research methods, enables the teachers to become teacher researchers as desired, who are in a position to plan, work at and evaluate their own professional development programme, which signifies the integration of the research on professional development and the teaching practice and integration of researchers on professional development and teachers.In addition, this programme is supposedly viewed as a breakthrough in its focusing on the learning and teaching process of the further education setting which is seldom stressed but just the same important as the college English teaching, reiterating due attention to this field in China in an attempt to promote the continuing education and lifelong study.Finally, as a new attempt and exploration, this case study and macro action research in a broader and deeper sense to promote self-directed professional development is designed to provide a tentative sample with action researches and reflection as the key components, together with specific, lengthy and far-reaching observation and analysis, to those language teachers who are striving for their lofty ideal for professional development, thus facilitating self-directed professional development for bringing the EFL teaching in China to a new better world. In other words, it might be expected to provide some new perspectives for pre-service teacher education in normal universities where cultivation of self-direction in those pre-service teachers' professional development, in light of their own understanding of one's conception about the nature of language, about language teaching, about one's teacher identity and students' identity, is desired to comprise the core of the teacher education.