On English Teachers’ Professional Development In A University For Nationalities From The Perspective Of The Learning Community

Education is the basis for the nation’s development while the teacher is the basis for education. With growing national prosperity and the country’s development, we need to create high quality and specialized teachers. In addition our country needs a large number of good teachers. Higher education leads the development of the society and pushes the progress of society. Higher education in minority areas is not only an important part of higher education in China, but also helps to cultivate ethnic minority talents and serves to further economic construction and social development. Due to the increasing frequency of international exchanges,it is clear that English plays an important role in China. So promoting college English teachers’ professional development and the improvement of teaching quality has been a focus of education teaching reform. Many factors and lack of cooperation have led to the English teachers in minority areas being isolated. This situation is not helpful to teachers’ professional development and improving the overall quality of teaching. These factors have an influence on the improvement of English teaching quality. With the development of education, learning community theory provides us a new perspective for teachers’ professional development, and learning community organization can help teachers break the pattern of isolation and learn to cooperate with each other.As a result, all teachers can use their group wisdom and strength to solve the problems in teaching and try to seek answers to their problems together.In this study the author takes English teachers in a University for Nationalities of Gansu Province as the research subjects. The author uses different methods such as the literature method,the questionnaire method and the interview method, to assess the current actual situation of teachers’ professional development. The questionnaire survey covers three aspects: 1) the English teachers’ basic information; 2) the situation of English teachers’ professional development; 3)activities of the English teachers’ professional development around learning communities. After that the author analyzes the existing problems and influencing factors according to the informationattained from the questionnaire survey. Based on the theoretical analysis, the author tells us characters of learning community, explains advantages and explores the following ideas and suggestions for teachers’ professional development: cultivating learning ideas as the premise;shaping a common vision as the goal; creating a platform of school-based teaching research activities as a fundamental component; creating a cultural atmosphere of cooperation as a key; and providing a supportive environment as a guarantee. The aim of the research is to provide effective methods for English teachers’ professional development in the universities for nationalities, to push English teachers to learn and to develop more effectively, and to improve the English teaching quality and level thus improving students’ English language ability in ethnic minority areas.