A College English Teacher’s Professional Development Action Research

The thesis reports the findings of an action research which aims to explore acollege English teacher’s professional development through self-study. I, the author ofthis thesis, am a college English teacher at Henan Polytechnic University. During thefirst term of2009-2010academic year, I conducted a4-month’s action research. Thepurpose was to improve my professionalism in the process of dealing with theproblems encountered in daily teaching activities. Specifically, the study was designedto answer three questions:1Is action research an effective form of professional development for collegeEnglish teachers？2In what aspects will action research influence teachers?3To what extent will such influence reach?Data were collected from teaching journals, questionnaires. Both qualitative analysisand quantitative analysis were adopted for the study.The results show that action research is able to provide an effective approach toteachers’ self-development: First, action research can help teachers to deal withpractical problems in daily classroom settings, thus improve their pedagogical skills.Second, action research enables teachers to be involved in teaching related research.Moreover, teachers are equipped with the autonomous self-developing ability: throughthe process of planning acting and reflecting, the teacher-researcher’s research abilitywere improved and became instinctively more reflective and more confident aboutteaching.The present study shows that action research can bring new insights to foreignlanguage teachers’ professional development, and more college English teachers areexpected to be actively reflective practitioners through such research approach andfulfill their in-service professional development through systematic and scientificprocess.