Research On In-service College English Teachers’Disposition

The focus of this research is in the area of teacher disposition. The aim of this thesis is to investigate in-service college English teacher’s disposition, and the factors, if any, that will affect teacher disposition. In recent years, teacher quality has become an important priority issue in American teacher education. And teacher disposition becomes a hot research focus. Positive teacher disposition is the basic part of the teacher’s overall quality, and it is important to improve the teacher’s quality of individual life and their own professional development. Teacher disposition is more important than knowledge and skills in the long run. It is necessary for a teacher to have definite professional knowledge and teaching skills and teach them in a certain way, but this is not enough, and it cannot ensure that the teachers would use his knowledge and skills well during teaching, so the teacher needs to have disposition to guide his teaching practice. Such a study is important in order to be beneficial to the student’s development, the teacher’s own professional development, and the continuous development of the universities. The research approach adopted in this thesis includes a review of relevant literature, questionnaires sent to some of the in-service college English teachers in Heilongjiang province, and interviews with a few of the in-service college English teachers. The findings from this research provide evidence that all the participants of the in-service college English teachers have positive disposition. The main conclusions drawn from this research are:the teacher’s disposition condition has no significant difference among the teachers who have different natural backgrounds (sex, age, education background, years of teaching experience, professional qualification, graduated university, or the different kinds of teaching colleges); but there is a significant correlation between teacher disposition and the factors of teacher’s communication with students, student’s performance, and teacher’s social value. Furthermore, teacher’s social value has predictive power on teacher disposition. This thesis recommends that we need to keep teacher’s positive disposition as long as possible. So we have to enhance teacher disposition training during the three stages of the pre-service teacher education, the novice teacher education, and the in-service teacher continuous education, in order to promote scientific teacher education and teacher’s professional development, and to foster more effective teachers and good students.