An Empirical Study Of The Categories And Reconstruction Of High School Novice English Teachers' Practical Knowledge In Classroom Teaching

Teachers'practical knowledge is one of the central themes within the field of language teacher education (Borg,2009). Since the term was first put forward by Elbaz in 1983, researchers have conducted numerous studies in this field. However, agreement cannot be achieved concerning what exactly constitute teachers'practical knowledge.After interviewing with an experienced Australian high school teacher named Sarah, she concluded that "this knowledge encompasses first hand experience of students' learning styles, interests, needs, strengths and difficulties, and a repertoire of institutional techniques and classroom management skills" (Elbaz,1983:11-47). The later scholars, inspired by her study, have made the individualistic nature of teachers'practical knowledge stand out in the last three decades. Most researchers embedded their studies in narrative approach. They use life-story, conversations and personal writings, metaphor, drawings, etc. to understand teachers'internal thinking. However, such research may lead to a collection of idiosyncratic teacher narratives, without any reference to scientific research (Tom & Valli,1990). There are also some scholars who begin their researches with the assumption what kinds of knowledge teachers may have (Meijer,1998; Dreil et al.,2001). Though scholars agree that teachers'practical knowledge cannot be examined without reference to what actually goes on in the classroom (Borg,1999), literature review revealed that a body of documented research that clarifies the links between teachers' personal practical knowledge and classroom practice has yet to develop. Furthermore, the empirical study on the categories and reconstruction of non-native ESL novice teachers' practical knowledge in China are less. The present project attempts to contribute to these aspects.Focusing on the classroom context, this study aims to explore the categories of teachers'practical knowledge and their frequency that the novices resort to while teaching. At the same time, the reconstruction of novices'practical knowledge is also investigated. The author employed the following instruments to elicit the introspective data:interviews, observations and stimulated verbal recalls obtained from novices who simultaneously watched forty-minute video of themselves teaching and reported on thoughts they had while teaching. The teachers'reflective journals and one novice's observation notes were also collected to triangulate with other data. Three novice English teachers of high school in China participated in our research. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of their verbal records indicates 258 teacher articulated behaviors and 82 personal working principles and the author further classifies the 82 personal working principles into eleven categories. Among them, general pedagogical knowledge, contextual knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, knowledge of students and subject content knowledge are reported more frequently than others; and we also found that the novice teachers' reconstruction of practical knowledge occurs especially when the following situations arise:comparison between self and colleagues, conflicts between the reality and previous knowledge and the spur of one cooperative school atmosphere.This study can be seen as additional to theories that exists about teachers'practical knowledge. Establishing practical knowledge categories that guides teachers'practice is not only a condition to improve the status of teaching as profession, it also serves a useful purpose in educating new or in-service teachers. The study provides us with some useful insights on teacher education giving to novices in the Chinese context:(1) Teacher educators are expected to help individual teachers to articulate her or his previous experiences and thus make sense of their work. (2) The reflection ability and skills of novice teachers are needed to be cultivated during the professional development. (3) School administrators should organize and support the collaborative mentored apprenticeship between new and experienced teachers. (4) School-based teaching research is highly recommended in the high school in China.Limitations and suggestions are also discussed in the study. It is hoped that this study could be replicated to verify the results and the comparative study between experienced and new teachers would be obtained in the future research.