Redefining The Role Of English Teachers In The Computer-Assisted Instruction Environment: From Reflections To Understanding

Initiated by the puzzles about the CAI-based English teaching for college non-English majors, the writer in this thesis attempts to explore the understanding of how the use of CAI in English teaching contributes to the change of teachers' role under the dominance of technology and how English teachers reflects their roles in the teaching context.Literature review reveals how the teachers change their role in different stages of their professional development under the pressure of the educational requirements. Educational development in different stages presents different views of professional development and therefore teachers' growth and teachers' role are consistantly reshaped. In the computer-based teaching environment, the teacher also needs some changes in their roles under the drive of new technology for building their new role as reflective learners.By drawing on the theory of Exploratory Practice developed by Dick Allwright and the communities of practice conceptualized by Wenger(1991, 1998), this thesis applauds the view of prioritizing 'quality of life' in the computer-based classroom and encourages the development of the informal leaning in the teacher and student learning community. At the same time, it turns to Foucault's concept of power relations embodied in pedagogy and Paulo Freire's liberation theory on education, which reveals that teachers, on the one hand, are considered possessing a constant authority over students in the classroom whatever form of pedagogy is involved, and on the other hand, are constantly reshaped by the power relations of school authority. In this case, both the learner and the teacher should be transformed into critical learners and researchers.In this case study, I made two in-depth interviews with three colleagues and conducted several classroom observations. The two interviews revealed how teachers changed their role from traditional knowledge providers to lifelong learners and reflective research practitioners in the adaptation to the new teaching environment. The classroom observations served as understanding the complexities of the teaching practice. Out of the investigation, the thesis found that: 1) Teachers should redefine their role as reflective learners by nurturing learning communities with their peers or their students. Meanwhile, the learning focus should be on the pursuit of "quality of life" rather than on "quality of work"; 2) Teachers should improve the capacity of critical thinking in response to the growing pedagogical dependency on information technology and conceive their own "best practices" with technology; 3) Teachers should be equipped with critical inquiry to face the unsatisfactory context of teachers' work concerning the CAI-based English teaching, thus emancipating themselves from coercive requirements of the school administration.