A Case Study On A Pre-Service English Teacher’s Pedagogical Content Knowledge Development—Based On Teaching Practice

With the development of modern society, professional expertise has gained growing attention in various research areas. Nowadays, teachers’ professional knowledge is no longer regarded as the simple addition of the subject matter knowledge and pedagogical knowledge or the accumulation of teaching experience. It should be a complicated combination of knowledge learned in education and teaching practice. Shulman defines teachers’ knowledge utilized in teaching as “pedagogical content knowledge”(PCK), and attaches great significance to it.In the postgraduate education program for pre-service teachers, an important task is to do teaching practice. Through teaching practice, pre-service teachers can make use of the knowledge they already have into the real teaching context and evolve into more capable teachers. Thus the researcher wanted to explore the process of a pre-service English teacher’s PCK development during her 70 days teaching practice. And then three research questions could be answered: 1) What are the sources and significance of the pre-service English teacher’s PCK before teaching practice? 2) What developments of PCK has the pre-service English teacher made during her teaching practice? 3) What are the factors that contributed to the development of the pre-service English teacher’s PCK?This study adopted the method of case study, focusing on the PCK development of a pre-service English teacher. The main research data came from the interviews and the narrative materials written by the research subject. These data presented the subject’s PCK prior to the teaching practice, as well as a picture of her teaching practice: when and what happened, and how she thought, acted and understood the events. At the same time, the related materials, such as the instructional designs, course wares and non-participant classroom observations were also collected, serving as proof for the reliability of the research subject’s PCK development.Referring to the frameworks of Shulman, Grossman, Andrews, Turner-Bisset, etc., theanalytic framework in this study was hence constructed. In the observation on the research subject, six dimensions of PCK were concerned about: conceptions of teaching goals,knowledge of curriculum, subject matter knowledge, knowledge of pedagogy, knowledge of students and knowledge of self. The six dimensions comprehensively reflected the PCK development of the pre-service teacher.The research results showed that the pre-service English teacher had gained PCK to some extent before the teaching practice, coming from the English learning experiences in primary and middle schools, English teacher education and significant people who had important influence on her. This was an indispensable basis for the further construction of PCK. During the teaching practice, the PCK of this teacher had improved overall while different components of it developed to different degrees, such as the knowledge of students grew obviously; the knowledge of pedagogy was not broadened but deepened. And from the growth of the pre-service English teacher, it can be seen that the factors that contributed to her PCK development were classroom observations, real teaching experiences, community of practice and self-reflection.As a case study, the lack of generality is unavoidable. And due to the limited time of the teaching practice, the research data are not sufficiently adequate. However, it can still provide implications for other pre-service English teachers’ PCK development and for the postgraduate education programs for pre-service teachers. At the same time, suggestions for future studies on pre-service English teachers’ PCK development are provided. The more intensive the researches are, the better development of PCK the pre-service teachers can have.