A Case Study On College English Teacher Learning Based On Teaching Reflection

Teacher development is an important contributing factor for education development as teachers play a crucial role in improving the quality of education, and teacher learning is the inner factor to get teachers improved. Much attention has increasingly been attached to teacher learning by researchers in the field of teacher education at present. Reflection is a main means to facilitate teacher learning and teacher professional development, which has been illustrated theoretically(Wallance, 1998; Shulman, 2004; Hu, 2005; Jiang, 2003) and empirically(Attard & Armour, 2004; Cheng, 2010; Wang, 2012), and a number of research finding are available in this field. However, few illuminate how reflections trigger or promote teacher learning through their teaching practice. With the aid of teaching reflection as well as sociocultural theory and situative learning theory, the present research aims to explore teachers’ learning through reflecting on their teaching practice in the hope of enriching the fruit of teacher learning research and providing some advice for teachers to get professional development through classroom teaching.As the overall implementation of teaching reform goes deeper and deeper, college English teachers are faced with great challenges. In addition, the reality of lacking of learning resources in the field of foreign language teaching forces college English teachers to seek an effective way to get them promoted from their own teaching practice. Under this circumstance, the research takes college English teachers as the research subject and relevant research questions are put forward: 1. How do college English teachers learn through their reflections on teaching practice? 2. What have college English teachers learned through reflecting on their teaching practice? 3. How do college teachers’ reflections influence their cognition and teaching practice?By using qualitative methodology, the research explores two college English teachers’ classroom teaching for one term. Multiple sources of data are collected, including classroom observation notes, interviews, teachers’ reflective journals and other relevant documents in order to analyze teacher learning through reflection in practice and reflection on practice. Three major findings emerge from data analysis. Firstly, on one hand, timely reflections in practice, namely the process of finding the problems, analyzing the problems and then solving the problems, trigger teachers’ thinking and then result in their learning. Students are the key factor to facilitate the two teachers’ learning, and students’ problems or difficulty in English learning cause teachers to reflect on their teaching practice. On the other hand, by means of the mediational role of teaching journals, teachers’ thinking gets further through after-class reflections, and their teaching practice gets improved gradually. Therefore, teachers get their professional development through continuous virtuous cycle between practice and reflection. Secondly, through reflection in practice and reflection on practice, teachers’ knowledge has been increased and deepened, such as knowledge about students, general pedagogical knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge and so on. All these knowledge gets further through their teaching practice. Thirdly, both teachers’ cognition and practice have been developed through their active teaching reflections and changes in cognition bring changes in their teaching practice.This research has demonstrated the possibility of teacher learning from their teaching practice through reflections, but the premise is that teachers should possess the ability to do reflective thinking. Therefore, for one thing, in-service teacher programs should pay attention to fostering college English teachers’ reflective thinking and improving their reflective ability, which will lay a solid foundation for teachers to learn from reflecting on their teaching practice; for another, teachers should learn to develop their reflective ability through teaching practice and achieve their professional development in the end.