Professional Development For Middle School English Teachers With The Background Of The New Curriculum

Since teaching became a profession authorized by UNESCO and ILO in 1960s, teacher professional development has been a worldwide tendency and requirement in educational field. Teacher professional development has been one of the focuses in education field since 1980s. This is because teacher professional development is the most effective way to improve teaching quality. At the beginning of this century, because of teacher's leading role in curriculum reform, teacher professional development has definitely become one of the hottest topics and at the same time, a problem to be solved urgently when the new curriculum is being carried out in China.However, up till now, most studies on teacher professional development orient on all teachers with all subjects. They lack pertinency, which results in the failure of a certain subject teacher professional development. Therefore, there is no way for the teacher of this certain subject to get self-improved and neither is the teaching quality of this certain subject.This thesis suggests some ways for middle school English teachers with the background of the new curriculum according to relevant theories on teacher professional development, linguistics,second language acquisition and didactics in English language. The ultimate purpose of this thesis is to improve teaching quality through the improvement of teacher's quality and acceleration of teacher's professional development course. In order to be more persuasive, the result of this research is based on an investigation with random subjects across the province. By comparing to the connotation of profession, the author comes to the conclusion that the ways for middle school English teacher professional development are reinforcement on teacher education, improvement on lifelong learning abilities, return of professional autonomy, improvement on research ability, improvement on collaborative learning ability and reinforcement on teacher ethic. It is the author's hope that this thesis can provide guidelines for both the middle school English teachers' self-development and teacher training administrators.