A Study On The Construction And Development Of Teachers’ Practical Knowledge

Curriculum reform is based on classroom teaching and served for classroom teaching. The top-level design of curriculum from educational authority is truly significant, but we need to realize that only when most teachers,"the group of practitioner", successfully integrate various new knowledge, new concepts and new beliefs into their class teaching practice, can the objectives of curriculum reform be achieved. Chen Xiangming (2011) pointed in her latest work that teachers should not be thought to be at the ending of the line of knowledge production and consuming. They had their own knowledge, namely, teachers’practical knowledge that was not only the main knowledge base for teachers’professional development but also the more important knowledge determined what teachers taught and how they taught. She (2011, p.2) also mentioned,"Research on TPK has special value for it not only provides new perspective for understanding teachers’work but also supplies detailed approaches and methods for teacher’s professional development". Therefore, research on TPK is of great urgency and importance in the present.This study, taking six high school novice EFL teachers as participants, expected to describe what kinds of TPK and how these kinds of TPK were constructed and developed in their classroom teaching practice. This study attempted to answer three questions:1) What kinds of TPK did high school novice EFL teachers construct and develop?2) How were these kinds of TPK constructed and developed during their early years of teaching practice?3) How did different mediums facilitate the construction and development of their TPK? Under the interpretive paradigm, this study is a qualitative study within which several instruments were adopted for data collection: semi-structured interview, structured interview, narrative interview, reflective journals, and so on. Synchronic analysis and diachronic analysis were used to deal with the qualitative data. The results showed:1) High school novice EFL teachers mainly constructed and developed five aspects of TPK, including TPK about educational concepts, TPK about English as a subject, TPK about students, TPK about self and TPK about teaching circumstance;2) Novice EFL teachers experienced a dynamic and developmental process/route of TPK construction and development, which could be extracted from the experiences of the participants;3) three main mediums, practice, reflection and learning, complemented one another and greatly facilitated the construction and development of TPK.This study was creative and special in that it took tuition-free normal graduates as study subjects and it explored the construction and development process/route of their TPK. On one hand, the special identity of tuition-free normal graduates decided their differences in cognitions, beliefs and some other aspects from non-normal graduates. On the other hand, novice teachers were in a critical stage of professional development, so they need more care and help from experts, researchers and teacher educators. This study was significant in that it provided useful theoretical and practical tools for novice teachers’ development; it could be regarded as an important reference for educational authorities to make policy; it provided a "practice-oriented" perspective for teacher educators in teacher training and education.