An Investigation On The Factors Affecting English Teachers' Classroom' Decision-making' In Rural Senior High Schools

Every teacher of English has received pre-service or in-service training. They had studied almost the same general theories related to language teaching before they became English teachers. But in authentic teaching, their practices differ markedly. It is certain that there must be some factors affecting the teachers' decision-making and thus affecting their teaching activities in their classrooms.Many factors that influence teachers' classroom decision-making in language teaching have been pointed out in various researches, but there are few such researches on the English teachers working in rural high schools. Because these teachers make up the majority of Chinese teachers, there is a special significance existing in the researches on them. In this study, the author investigates and studies twenty-four in-service English teachers working in rural senior high schools, all of which are located in Guangfeng county, Jiangxi province, in order to examine the factors affecting teachers' decision-making. The teachers involved in this study are all experienced, each with at least ten years of teaching experience. Twenty of them are from public schools and four from private schools. The data in this study is gathered from questionnaires, interviews and lesson observations of the twenty-four teachers. An analysis is made of the factors affecting the teachers' actual decisions made in their classrooms. The results indicate that teachers' educational background, teaching experiences and different teaching context do have influence on teachers' decision-making in their teaching, and that the factors are mainly connected with the unique centralized examination-driven educational system and the current ways of evaluation, and they also influence teachers' creativity and imagination in their English teaching.