An Investigation Of English Postgraduates’ Shuoke Skills Based On The New Curriculum Reform

For the everlasting fortune of one nation, education is, without doubt, the foundation. In order to realize the high-quality elementary education in China, carrying out curriculum reforms admits of no delay. To this end, the Ministry of Education of People’s Republic of China issued Outline for Basic Education Curriculum Reform (Trial) in June, 2001, which proposed innovative concepts and put forward new requirements for the country’s elementary education in the new century. Needless to say, teachers are one of the key elements to the realization of reform goals and their qualities are the prerequisite for the success of educational reforms. Therefore, it is a gigantic task for teacher educators to cultivate high-quality pre-service teachers and make them excellent teachers in the foreseeable future.Teachers’qualities can be reflected by their performances in shuoke, that is, brief introductions and explanations of lesson designs as well as related rationale. On the one hand, shuoke is a concentrated reflection of teachers’understandings of the curriculum, lesson preparations as well as the introspection of classroom teaching, which is a comprehensive practice including educational thoughts, professional knowledge, theoretical levels and basic teaching qualities of teachers. On the other hand, as an integrated teaching and research activity, shuoke fully embodies teachers’professional skills in oral expressions, writings, lesson designs, employment of educational technologies, classroom teaching and reflections. However, it was found that most of the research participants of previous studies were undergraduate students and especially normal students, while few were English postgraduates. Considering the distinctive characteristics of postgraduates in normal universities, this research took 208 postgraduates, among whom 201 intended to be teachers upon graduation, in the English department from Central China Normal University as the research participants, hoping to investigate die status quo of their shuoke skills. This research used both the questionnaire and the interview. The research questions are as follows:(1) What are participants’perceptions of shuoke?(2) What are the constituents of participants’ shuoke skills?(3) What problems do participants have in their shuoke skills under the new curriculum reform? And what are the possible ways to improve their shuoke skills?It was found in this research that although only less than one third of the participants knew shuoke very well, most of them held positive attitudes towards shuoke for various benefits it had brought to them, such as improving their teaching skills, enhancing expressive skills, perfecting the English knowledge system and so on, among which the improvement of teaching skills ranked top one. The reasons were that shuoke could help the participants form a holistic view of the teaching material, achieve better teaching effects after doing shuoke first, improve the basic qualities as teachers and so on.As to the skill construction of shuoke, it was found that most of the participants could reach the basic standards for oral expressions and writings in English, and they paid attention to the employment of body language, too. However, they tended to refer to the templates from the Internet before shuoke, which led to participants’ low originality in their lesson designs. Besides, though most of the participants were experienced at computers, especially the use of the PowerPoint to improve teaching efficiency, some simply equaled the modern teaching aids with the PowerPoint and overlooked other forms like flash and Authorware. Several problems were also found in participants’ lesson designs:some participants failed to get a holistic view of the teaching material for elementary education; some had difficulty in identifying the three-dimensional teaching objectives as well as the focal and difficult points; some were not familiar with learning methods advocated by the curriculum reform; some were not acquainted with students’ actual situations; most of them were lacking in the knowledge of the theoretical bases for shuoke. But participants as a whole had a relatively high degree of reflection before and after shuoke activities, which would help them make rapid progress.Besides the above problems manifested in the skill construction of shuoke, some participants were not confident and the class size in education major was too large. The biggest problem was participants’ lack of teaching and shuoke experience since there were not many internship opportunities, relevant courses and teachers’guidance. Besides, participants were not familiar with shuoke themselves.Based on the results of the research, five suggestions on the improvement of pre-service teachers’ shuoke skills were provided, including offering more educational practices, offering relevant optional teaching methodology courses, inviting excellent teachers to demonstrate on shuoke or chair lectures and so on. It is expected that through this research, pre-service teachers can make up for their existing deficiencies timely, and the university can better serve society by providing more excellent future teachers.