A Research On In-service Junior Middle School English Teachers' Continuing Education

The whole world has been concerning about the development of human quality, and all nations laid their stress on the issue of teacher development. Teacher education has been considered as a key factor in strategies to raise the quality of education and talents development. With the initiation of the Gardener Project, the research into INSET (in-service education and training) has aroused more and more concern. A lot of experts, scholars and teachers have done a lot in this area. However, according to the information in some related research, the development of INSET in our country is less encouraging at present. Education is the very foundation on which we build our country. As showed in "national mid-term and long-term educational reform and development program" published recently, we have attached great importance to the INSET. Therefore, this survey is meaningful to the development and reform of education.Inspired by the results of other scholars, and based on some related theories, such as teacher education, INSET, teacher professional development and reflective teaching, this survey aims at finding out the current situation of continuing education for in-service English teachers in middle schools and trying to put forward some suggestions. Questionnaires and random interviews are used to collect first-hand quantitative and qualitative material. The subjective of this survey are in-service English teachers from five municipal and county-level junior high schools in Guilin. This survey will finally answer those specific questions:(a) what's the current situation of INSET for junior school English teachers? (b) What are the demands of junior school English teachers on INSET? (c) How to provide a practical and effective way of English teacher INSET?After the data analysis and discussion, the writer concluded the main problems existed in the present training programs are as following:(a) the theories lose contact with practice so that the knowledge obtained from the training programs cannot be capitalized fully; (b) The big-class teaching model affects the learning results; (c) the teaching method is trainer-centered, thus the training content may be learned repeatedly; (d) it lacks the case analysis focus on some individual cases, which is not so useful to solve the practical problems in teaching; (e) it is short of discussion and diagnosis between the classmates in the teacher training class; (f) there is less or even no chance to directly communicate with experts during the training process. In accordance with those problems, this survey put forward some suggestions:firstly, changing the training model to fit the characteristics of in-service teachers; secondly, setting some targets to make the training more practical and more target-oriented; thirdly, improving training methods to make the training more effective. What's more, there are also some other suggestions in course design and in-service teachers'ability cultivation.This thesis covers six chapters:Chapter One is introduction, including backgrounds and the significance of this research and so on; Chapter Two is literature review which introduces some related definitions, a brief review of studies of teachers'development both at home and abroad and also focuses on theoretical basis of this survey; Chapter Three is research design which describes the subjects, objectives, devices, specific procedures of this research and data collection; Chapter Four presents data analysis and discussion; findings of discussion and suggestions will appear in Chapter Five; Chapter Six is conclusion.