An Investigation Of Professional Development Of Junior High School English Teachers In Rural Areas

Since the 21 st century, the researchers in teacher education field have just began to attach great importance to the professional development of English teachers, but most of the researchers focus on the professional development situations of English teachers in urban or university, and researches on the professional development of rural junior high school English teachers are quite few. However, the present situation in China shows that the size of population in rural areas always occupies a large proportion, so the elementary education in rural areas should have been paid more attention. However, the junior high school is a transition of primary school and senior high school, so the teaching quality and teaching results of junior high school will influence the teaching development of next stage directly. Previous researches mainly focus on a certain aspect, such as the quality of teacher, the capacity of teachers or teachers’ beliefs and so on. However, the researches on a concrete subject and different professional development stages of teachers are quite few, and the researches aiming at the professional development stages of English teachers are much fewer. According to the deficiency of previous study and current situations, the researcher does an investigation on junior high school English teachers in rural areas, and the research aims to explore the characteristics of teachers in different professional development stages, and analyze the factors that influence the professional development of teachers in different professional development stages, and finally provide some approaches to the professional development of different teachers.On the basis of above purposes of this research, this study firstly follows a mixed research method, combining the quantitative and qualitative study, which carries out a questionnaire investigation on 520 junior high school English teachers in Hebei province in order to generally learn the current situations of different junior high school English teachers development stages in rural areas, and then the researcher takes a one-to-one interview for exploring the characteristics of them on the basis of the pre-survey and literatures, and finally provides practical approaches to the professional development of different professional development stages of teachers.The research results show that junior high school English teachers in rural areas are faced with more challenges compared with English teachers in urban or university, such as lacking of teaching resources, simple teaching implementation and so on. Junior high school English teachers of different professional development stages own different characteristics in professional knowledge, professional skills, professional emotion, teachers’ beliefs and so on, and they are influenced by society and school. On the basis of above research results, the researcher illuminates some approaches to developing junior high school English teachers of different professional development stages, and provides some suggestions for future study.