The Research On Excellent College EFL Teacher Classroom Decision Making From The Perspective Of Instructional Strategies

With the advance of the instructional reform for College EFL teachers, they are empowered more chances to make their own decisions, the result of which facilitates them to transform their roles from the course practitioners to decision makers. Teaching actually is considered as a cognitive process full of complexity and inconstancy. During the process of teaching, the EFL teachers should devise, choose and implement their teaching plans continuously according to the real situation in class. Some researches demonstrate that teacher decision making can be divided into different phases and distinct features are noticed in them. Based on the view of the scholars Wilen et al., our research intends to divide teacher decision making into three phases: planning decision making, classroom decision making, and evaluation decision making. Classroom decision making takes place in the process of teaching, therefore it is such a dynamic activity that puts high demands on teacher wisdom. English classroom is filled with lots of uncertain factors, so EFL teachers can not teach totally according to their teaching plan while they should make various improvisational decisions in the light of real situation in the classroom.Instructional strategies are considered as a vital way to organize teaching activities and helpful for EFL teachers in the aspect of choosing reasonable instructional methods,materials and resources. Instructional strategies function both as an important content and a crucial means for classroom decision making. English classroom involves an intricate system, which causes EFL teacher classroom decision making to be unpredictable and instant. From this perspective, it is understandable that the process of EFL teacher classroom decision making is difficult to perceive. However, instructional strategies exhibit themselves as an integral part of classroom decision making.Therefore we intend to make use of instructional strategies to investigate the process of EFL teacher classroom decision making and the factors influencing it; besides we also try to find out the effective ways to improve their classroom decision making competence.Our research attempts to investigate the EFL teacher classroom decision making,which is exemplified by the EFL teachers in Chongqing University. We takes 30 EFL teachers from Chongqing University as our subjects and try to collect the first-hand information about their decision making by the use of several research methods such asclassroom observation, interview and questionnaire. We aim at discovering their behaviors for decision making and illustrating their thinking and the latent reasons behind their decisions. Our result demonstrates that excellent college EFL teachers prefer employing these strategies of questioning and giving feedback such as “phrase questions in English clearly to students without run-on question” and “encourage students to begin or continue to complete certain English leaning task” respectively when it comes to the classroom decision making in questioning and giving feedback;and they like to use such cooperative learning strategies as “observe their activity as a group and encourage them to exchange their ideas in English within group” in terms of the classroom decision making in cooperative learning. As for the factors influencing exellent college EFL teacher classroom decision making, we classify them into two overarching categories: teachers' internal factors and external factors in terms of students and the environment. Besides, based on our research we put forward three peices of advice to improve college EFL teacher classroom decision making: to raising their awareness of making classroom decision, to deepen their understanding of students and teaching, and to create a harmonious atmosphere.