Foreign Language Teacher Cooperation And Development Theory And Its Mode Of Study

Foreign Language Teacher Development, as a current educational approach, aims at exploring and researching how foreign language teachers develop themselves professionally and psychologically. Teachers are not lonely individuals in the process of self-development but they interact with surroundings and cooperate with colleagues. Cooperative Development is a style of interaction designed to allow two teachers to collaborate on furthering the ideas and plans of one of the pair. It is a kind of reflection through articulation to realize self-development. Self-development of foreign language teachers not only promotes foreign language teaching, but also improves students' foreign language learning.This paper discusses the theory and model of Cooperative Development for foreign language teachers. It falls into four parts:Part One summarizes the literature and significance of the theory and model of Cooperative Development for foreign language teachers and briefs the method of this study.Part Two introduces the theory and three important models of foreign language teacher development.Part Three elaborates Cooperative Development Theory and differ it from the other three models. The theory was put forward by Julian Edge in 1992 in his Cooperative Development: Professional Self-Development through Cooperation with Colleagues as a way of working together with someone in order to become a better teacher in teacher's own terms. It is an effective way of teachers' self-reflection and self-development through articulation.Part Four illustrates in detail the model of Cooperative Development Theory. It is a model of self-development through the cooperation between the speaker and the listener by means of exploration, discovery and action. The cooperation leads the speaker to feel supported and successful in one area of teaching, then that teacher will continue to act as before, but with an increased sense of confidence and security. Non-defensive articulation and non-judgmental listening not only stimulates the teacher's reflection but also facilitates self-understanding and self-development.