IT And Tesol Teaching Of Higher Institutions: Teacher's Role

This thesis is the result of quasi-experimental research constructed upon the hypothesis that improved IT expertise of TESOL teachers can facilitate their development in college English teaching performance, English subject knowledge, career satisfaction, role change and other aspects of professional development. Through collecting the information about IT expertise of the active teachers from the sampled universities, diagnosis of the status quo of their IT expertise is reached, together with their requests and quandaries. Then, with correlation analysis between IT expertise level and multi-dimensional professional development, the absolute value of IT expertise in helping TESOL faculties of domestic higher institutions is confirmed.The questionnaire part of this study was conducted between April 2008 and July 2008. 712 students and 41 TESOL faculties from Nanjing Agricultural University (NJAU) were involved in the school-based questionnaire. Besides, 29 TESOL faculties from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA), 13 from Nanjing University (NJU) and 14 from Nanjing Normal University (NNU) were involved in the questionnaire part. The instruments adopted in this research include: pilot test form of teacher questionnaire, teacher questionnaire, pilot student questionnaire, student questionnaire. All data collected are accordingly transferred and subjected to the statistic analysis in SPSS13.0 Software Package.After precise and substantial data analysis under the context of well-combed existed relevant studies, this study is completed with the following conclusions:1. TESOL teachers of NJAU are generally found to be under-developed in IT expertise,innovative application of IT in teaching organization, teaching content and teachingconcept. Substantial gap still obstructs between the TESOL faculties from othersampled universities.2. All involved students and TESOL teachers believe that improved IT technology expertise and application ability in TESOL teaching practice will surely be echoed by improved classroom teaching quality and teacher's performance.3. Common factors such as gender, age and education level do not exert a significant influence over the IT expertise of TESOL faculties. TESOL faculties of NJAU need to be more innovative and equip themselves with multiple endeavors to update their IT expertise and the ability of applying IT technology into real time teaching practice.4. Literature reviews on the relevant studies done in the past decade reveals a trend of increasing volume of domestic thematic studies in teacher development. Nevertheless, not many researches provide insights of teacher development from the IT angle, not to mention empirical researches well supported with hard facts. College English teachers, confronting this challenge, shall brace themselves up for pursuing new growth point of College English Teaching as being an independent discipline.5. Improved IT expertise of TESOL teachers is also beneficial to clear the way for better professional competence of TESOL teachers. With a better understanding of their roles and refreshed tasks, teachers' reflective ability is honed for the sake of a successful TESOL curriculum reform in the future.