An Investigation Of EFL Teachers’ Personal Practical Knowledge Development From Pre-service Period To In-service Period—A Case Study

Teacher’s practical knowledge is the basic knowledge for teachers’ professional development. It relies on teacher’s past experiences, exists in teacher’s current teaching life, and probably forecasts teacher’s future teaching. It’s a dynamic and continuously developing process through teacher’s past, present and future. Teachers generally acquire most of their knowledge during their interaction with a variety of systems. This knowledge is then converted into practical knowledge in order to meet the practical and situational demands of teaching. Practical knowledge constitutes "those beliefs, insights, and habits that enable teachers to do their work in schools."(Feiman&Floden,1986). To study teacher’s personal practical knowledge, we need an appropriate method which can get deep into teacher’s teaching and life. Narrative inquiry, because of its intimate relation with human experience, provides a new approach for teacher education. Narrative inquiry was brought in with the rise of qualitative research in recent years. It was mainly used to study teacher’s daily life and experience and to dig in the educational meanings behind the "stories" in their teaching life. Teacher’s personal practical knowledge hides in their teaching "stories". To find out the meanings behind those stories can help us understand the hidden personal practical knowledge.This study reports on a longitudinal research examining an English teacher’s change on personal practical knowledge over a year when she turned from the role of a student teacher to a novice teacher. The research started from Helen’s internship training in the university educational program, and lasted to the period when she became a real in-service teacher after graduation. Data was collected through the use of conversations and teaching journals.The data analysis is divided into four parts, the first part describes Helen’s internship experiences and analyzes her characteristics of personal practical knowledge as a student teacher; the second part describes Helen’s experiences in the first three months of her in-service period and analyzes her characteristics of personal practical knowledge as an in-service teacher; the third part compares the differences of her personal practical knowledge from the two periods, and the causes leading to the change; the fourth part is the conclusion. The results indicate that Helen’s personal practical knowledge has changed in some aspects, such as, she no longer believed in "equality" between teacher and students and applied the "inequality" position; she was happy for most of the time in her internship while anger took most of her emotion when she was a beginning teacher; she concerned more about students’interests in the internship while now she concerned more about students’ grades. Those changes have many factors, including Helen’s heavy reliance on intern experience, her neglect of the difference in educational object, different stress for different roles in school, and her determination of adapting the situations helped to make the change.Those findings can be useful for the design and development of EFL teacher education programs, such as, internship in pre-service teachers’education program should focus more on student teachers’cognitions of their roles in teaching and in knowing themselves as teachers; the educational objective in pre-service teacher’s internship should be taken into great consideration; the institutions should pay great attention to new teachers’stress, which can greatly influence their teaching; the pre-and in-service teachers’emotions should be cared and they should be encouraged to adapt the new environment.