Exploring A Narrative-inquiry-based English Pedagogy Course: A Case Study Of An In-service Teacher Training Program

This study begins with a critical reflection on the knowledge bases for the mainstream teachers' training programs home and abroad, and focuses on the English pedagogy course of the in-service teacher training program in Foreign Language College in ZJN University. The program starts from the teachers' experiences in order to raise their awareness and sensitivity to those taken-for-granted things. It also guides the T-learners to derive the puzzles from their own stories which are used and inquired as data base later in their research projects. In this way T-learners' researches are closely related with their local, situated problems. Being interested by the story-telling & sharing of the course, I take this as my concern. Specifically, this study attempts to explore the following three questions: 1) what are the charms of the stories told by the T-learners during the course? 2) why do the T-learners tell and share stories in the classes? 3) what had the T-learners experienced during the course?The study, which lasts for nearly about two years, is conducted on the course 28 Med~1 students took during the first term of the academic year of 2006, and on their lives after the program. The research methods adopted are mainly narrative inquiry and case study, as well as class observation, interview, and so on. The data include classroom records, educators' journals, the T-learners' story scripts, after-class interviews, classroom collections, my own field notes, and so forth.From the data collected, the study educes that stories are the representation of experience and teacher knowledge, and are tools to approach or understand theories. Then it finds that the activity of story-telling & sharing promotes triadic dialogues both among the group of T-learners and within individual T-leaner's past, present and future, and helps to form a learning "family" in the group. Finally, the research suggests promoting T-learners to be researchers, and does an inquiry of the training program itself and produces a complex network of the course journey.The main findings show that the in-service teachers come to the program not like empty vessels to be filled in, but with a world of their unique teaching and learning puzzles, which they may solve by themselves if they learn how to inquire and research them. It suggests that the instructors of in-service teacher training programs need to reshape their beliefs in the teachers and the concept of knowledge bases, which may bring about the shifting of their beliefs in the T-learners from teachers as technicians, knowledge consumers, language points transmitters to teachers as thinkers, knowledge generators and researchers. And the after program communication between instructor and T-learners and among T-learners should be encouraged, as well as the establishment of learning communities in the schools.