A Survey On Professional Development Of Beginning Foreign Language Teachers In Higher Vocational And Technical Colleges

With the depth of educational reform around the world, scholars and governments all over the world realize that the teacher plays a very important role in the educational reform. The quality of education, to great extent, depends on the teachers'qualities. Research on foreign language teachers'professional development abroad stemmed from the 1960s, and was explored extensively in Europe and America in the 1970s and 1980s, while the relevant research in China has been more than 20 years behind compared to the overseas research. And nowadays it is stepping into a highly-developed stage. There are thousands of beginning teachers entering teaching groups every year. Their initial stage of professional development is a key and special one, which plays a decisive role in their lifelong professional qualities. It not only determines whether the teachers will continue to work in this field, but also what kind of teachers they will be. At the same time, the scale of foreign language teacher education in China is the most colossal one in the whole world, but research on foreign language teacher education is quite limited, furthermore, very few research focus on professional development of beginning foreign language teachers in the contexts of higher vocational and technical colleges. This is not only the goal of research, but also a difficult point that the researcher attempts to break through.Due to the insufficient subject-matter knowledge and pedagogical knowledge and unfamiliarity of the students, teaching materials and environment beginning foreign language teachers are under great anxiety and pressure. Therefore, it is necessary and significant to carry out research on their professional development.The present research mainly explores the following three research questions: (1)What's the general situation of professional development of beginning foreign language teachers in higher vocational and technical colleges? (2) what factors influence their professional development? (3) What strategies can be used to help improve the teachers'professional development? It aims to learn about the general situation of the professional development of beginning foreign language teachers and deduce the influential factors. The researcher chose 80 beginning foreign language teachers from five different higher vocational and technical colleges as the subjects, and adopted both quantitative and qualitative methods. The former mainly focuses on questionnaire. All the data obtained from the questionnaire were processed by SPSS 13.0. While the latter concentrates on interview. According to the results of the questionnaire, the author interviewed eight beginning foreign language teachers via internet and attempted to obtain the effect of co-verifying and co-supplement.The findings can be summarized as follows. First, Professional development of the beginning foreign language teachers from higher vocational and technical colleges is below the medium level. Second, there are both intrinsic factors and extrinsic factors influencing the beginning foreign language teachers'professional development. Intrinsic factors consist of teachers'age, characters, and professional titles, teachers themselves, such as, professional intensions, teachers'self-awareness of professional development, subject-matter knowledge, teaching skills, teaching experience and research abilities. Extrinsic factors influencing foreign language teachers'professional development include college's culture and academic environment, college's administration and evaluation of teachers, family, and students. Third, the detailed manifestations of influential factors, such as, age, character, professional titles and degree are the following:beginning teachers at the age of 26-30 are relatively in a better state during their professional development than the ones at the age 20-25 and the age above 30; the more extroverted beginning teachers are, the more flexible skills and strategies they will utilize in their language teaching; assistant beginning teachers can use more flexible teaching skills than teachers without professional title and lecturers; And teaching year and degree and training are not influential factors towards the beginning teachers'professional development.The research expands the scope of the theory of professional development from the perspective of beginning teachers. It provides some beneficial enlightenment to foreign language teaching reform and is of great value to improve beginning foreign language teachers'teaching practices, and to develop their self-awareness of professional development.