The Effects Of Guided Reflection On English Teachers’ Reflective Practice

The goal of this study is to explore the effects of guided Reflection on beginning English teachers’reflective practice and puts forward the following research questions:1）To what extent does unguidedreflection differ from guided-reflection on contents and levels of reflection of Beginning English Teachers?2）To what extent does reflective practice of beginning English Teachers change by guided reflection?The case study with the qualitative and quantitative research methods follows up three beginningEnglish teachers’ reflection before and after guidance within a semester in Gansu Institute of political andlaw. This study adopts three reflective approaches, which includes written reflections, collaborativedialogue and classroom observation. The research data mainly comes from dairies entries, oral excerptsand videotapes and the Flanders Interaction Analysis System (FIAS), etc.. Through the above approachesand then explore reflection on the effects of teaching practice and promoting professional development.Research findings show that guided reflection can bring changes of the contents and levels ofbeginning English teachers’ reflection, and then promote teaching practice to a certain extent. The changeof the reflection contents is shown as: the beginning English teachers’ unguided-reflection mainly talkedabout the classroom teaching category, evaluation category and affect domain. In addition to above field, inguided-reflection, the teacher began to reflect on students’ learning, teaching theory and self-awarenessand so on. From the reflection level, three participants get promoted from the original reflection level, butdifferent teachers have their different characteristics. From teaching practice, beginning English teachersare well improved in the classroom atmosphere, but class structure and teachers’ inclination need to beimproved afterwards.This research shows that reflective ability of beginning English teachers are relatively low though theclassroom atmosphere, class structure and teachers’ inclination can be improved by systematical guidance.However, the way of reflective thinking of beginning English teachers is improved very slowly, whichneed a long process to be developed.Beginning English teachers as a special group will become a new strength of excellent teachers in thefuture, then the improvement of reflective ability can promote teachers’ professional development.Keywords: Beginning English Teachers; The Contents of Reflection; The Levels of Reflection; ReflectivePractice.