A Narrative Inquiry Into The Personal Knowiedge Of A High School English Teacher

Traditional mode of English teacher development, in the context of curriculum reform of Education, has experienced more criticisms than ever before. Teacher personal theory and the practice-oriented teacher professional development are increasingly focused. As the foundation of teacher's development, teacher's personal knowledge, which reflects teacher's educational ideas, originates from their experience of being taught and teaching practice, instructs their teaching practice and makes impact on their prospective teaching. Teacher's personal knowledge, which contains many aspects and is complex, will be in a constant developing process with teaching. Therefore, in order to explore teacher's personal knowledge of novice English teacher, we need to enter into teacher's life to learn about teacher's daily life, staying with him in his working place. As a new method for educational study, narrative inquiry is employed as the research method of this study because it is closer to teacher's life. With this method teacher's experience is presented and studied as educational stories which reflect teachers'real life and their voices. This research focuses on a novice English teacher Long's life and aims to explore the process of teacher's personal knowledge development and the factors that influence its development.This research is based on constructivism, humanism, action research and reflective teaching and action research and the research questions are following:(1) Before working, what knowledge does a novice teacher have?(2) What are the factors that influence the shaping of teacher's personal knowledge of novice English teacher before working?(3) What changes of teacher's knowledge of novice English teacher take place in the teaching?(4) What are the factors the influence the construction of teacher's knowledge of novice teacher? Narrative inquiry is employed to conduct this research and the participant Long is a novice English teacher from high school in He Nan province. It consists of three stages to conduct this research:firstly, entering into the working place. In order to collect data the researcher has to carry on individual interviews, classroom observation, narrative stories collection and other related materials collection: secondly, composing field text. All the data that is collected in the first stage should be classified and transcribed into field texts; in the last stage qualitative research is used to analyze the field texts as well as other data, and then the research questions are answered and finally the research results are presented.The implications of this study are as following:employing narrative inquiry as research method, this research shows the voice of novice English teachers, which naturally contributes to arousing novice English teachers' subject consciousness and catch people's attention on their teaching practice. The research and analysis of teacher's personal knowledge benefit the professional development of novice English teachers and also prove that narrative inquiry is a suitable research method for exploring teachers' personal knowledge of novice English teacher. And this research can contribute to the further study of teacher development and teacher education.