A Survey Investigating The Conceptions Of Teaching Held By Chinese Teachers Of The New National Curricula Exerimental Regions & The Application Of Its Findings

Changing the conceptions of teaching is not only the end, but also the starting point of the new curricula reform in China; therefore, a thorough survey of it is badly needed to evaluate the effects and strategies of the reform, which has been implementing for more than 3 years.Finding out the "real", but not the "claimed" or "deduced" conceptions is the most important point while investigating the teaching conceptions held by experimental teachers. The theory of Phenomenograpgy provides both rationale and methodology for the survey. By using existed questionnaire TCT (Teachers' Conception of Teaching), data analysis was done to figure out the characteristics of the conceptions of teaching held by Chinese teachers in the new national curricula exerimental regions.The findings included the followings:1. Teachers in the experimental regions widely adopted the interactive orientation of teaching while they still kept on holding the knowledge delivery and exam preparation conceptions of teaching.2. Conceptions of teaching differed from regions. As far as the factor of economic development is concerned, teachers from medium-developed regions held the most contradictive conceptions than those from richer or poor regions.3. Concerning the factor of teaching experience, teachers with more than 21 years' teaching experience were obviously different from other groups, i.e., old teachers were comparatively more for molding orientation and attitude promotion.4. School bands had some effects on teachers' molding orientation. Teachers from band- 4- schools usually adopted more molding orientions than those from band-1-schools.5. Compared with primary school teachers, teachers in secondary schools paid more attention to knowledge deliverying, examination preparation and guidance conducting.Attitude towards molding oriention tells more about the reform than others. It is impossible for the teachers to implement interactive orientation into their teaching practice if they insist strongly on the conceptions of knowledge diliverying and exam preparation. Results of this survey also implied that there was no clear trend of teachers' giving up molding orientation during the past 3 years. To change the teachers' conceptions, we still have a long way to go.