Integrating ICT Into EFL Teachers' Professional Development

The 21st century has witnessed an information society with ICT (information & communication technology) as its core. The information level has become one of the important indexes to measure a country's modernization level and its comprehensive national power. It is one of the basic requirements in a country's information society construction to raise its nationals' information quality and to cultivate information-based talents. Information-based education serves as an important foundation in and country's information society construction. The information-based teachers' education is an important component for a country to apply information technology in its education career, and it is an important force to propel educational information construction.This paper, through questionnaires responded to by 88 secondary school teachers of English, has detected tense work-training relations among the teachers of English. The existing professional development forms, such as short-term training, workshop, etc. are monotonous and cannot meet the English teachers' requirements of varied aspects at different levels. These trainings or workshops are still instructor-centered, and the trainees are still passive receivers. The development and application of ICT has led to the transformation of learning models, which makes possible the secondary school English teachers' independent learning, self-initiated research and cooperative exchange.This paper, taking the theories of constructivist learning, experiential learning and transformational learning as its guidelines, based upon the requirements of secondary school English teachers' professional development, advocates the establishment of networked society for secondary school English teachers' professional development and argues for individualistic learning, self-initiated probe, democratic discussion, cooperative research, etc. for the teachers' professional development, which, eventually, results in the improvement of teachers' teacher and students' learning. Besides, this paper alsoproposes some basic methods for secondary school English teachers' professional development:1. ICT-based individualistic learning;2. On-line instructions by experts/excellent teachers;3. Cooperative learning with asynchronous ICT;4. Self-reflection (playback) review;5. Case study in the cyber space;6. Interactive exchange with synchronous ICT;7. Virtual situational learning;8. Scientific research with the help of super-links; and9. Motivation of multi-intelligence factors in the cyber space...