An Exploration Into Middle School English Teachers' Professional Development-From The Perspective Of Curriculum Reform In China

Based on the theory of Teacher Professional Development, this research aims to investigate the current situations of the New Curriculum Reform starting from the reality of teachers' professional life in the background of the New Curriculum Reform and tries to find out a good solution to existing problems.The research examines the professional development paths of four English teachers from a senior high school of Huainan city in Anhui province as the main participants. The study attempts to make an analysis of their life and practices under the impact of New Curriculum Reform by questionnaires and narrative inquiry. The investigation lasted for more than eight months, and the collected data include interview records, teachers' acknowledgements, dialogues and the reform documents, etc.The findings of the research are manifested in three ways. Firstly, we find that teachers are still in a powerless position though the Reform has been carried out for more than 6 years. Teacher's aspiration as " the curriculum builder and implementer" has never been realized despite the role definition in the official documents. The key reason is that the Reform implementation still follows the traditional top-down way: the administration organ determines everything and the teacher has nothing to do but obey. Secondly, the Reform brings much more pressures to the teacher. They are lost in a dilemma: one is the National College Entrance Examination scores, the other is the quality education. Consequently, daily teaching practices: overloaded and repetitive. have lost its original liveliness and attraction. What's more, the profession has been reduced to mechanical repetition focusing on specific teaching and learning drill. This is largely due to the fact that the teaching assessment remains intact while other aspects of education have been reformed. The third finding, different from those of the former researches, deserves our attention. In the study, we find that teachers are quick to accept the new theories; however, their practices lag behind their theories a lot. Most of them, whether they are in the early, middle or later stage of their careers, lose their enthusiasm to different degrees.Conclusively, the study proposes that these problems can be solved through two ways. First, teachers need to strengthen their critical awareness in order to get more chances and space for their professional autonomy. Second. as a potential way of teacher development, reflective thinking will be more desirable. Teachers should follow the idea—the lifelong study, and form the habit of lifelong study in order to reconstruct the professional development.