A Study Of The Pre-service English Teachers' Cognition Of The English Teaching Methods

Since the 1970 s,language teacher cognition has been one of the major growth areas in the world for second or foreign language teacher education.Due to its significant role in teacher development and teacher education,the research on foreign language teacher cognition has witnessed an enormous increase in the past years.Different aspects relating to foreign language teacher cognition have been studied,including teachers' pedagogical thoughts,types of teacher knowledge,the role of teachers' personal and practical knowledge in teacher cognition;foreign language teachers' beliefs in teaching;the relationship between foreign language teachers' beliefs and practices.From 2000 until today,more and more researchers have begun to study foreign language teacher cognition,especially pre-service teachers' cognition.However,there is still an inadequate research on pre-service English teachers' cognition of the English teaching methods.Therefore,this research aimed at pre-service English teachers' cognition of English teaching methods.This research adopted the questionnaire and interview to explore the pre-service English teachers' cognition of English teaching methods.The participants were 234 English education major students,who were from the School of Foreign Language &Literature in a normal university in Yunnan province,and 16 of them were interviewed.The data obtained from the questionnaire were analyzed by means of SPSS 17.0 for description.The major findings from the research were shown as follows: firstly,those pre-service English teachers' best understanding of teaching method was task–based language teaching,followed by communicative language teaching,the audiolingual method,and cooperative language learning.Among English teaching methods,they had incomprehension with the silent way and whole language.Secondly,among the sources of English teaching methods,the methods course were the most frequently used,and followed by reading teaching case,methods books,and watching the MOOCs.Besides,a few students acquired the knowledge of Englishteaching methods from lectures.Thirdly,the majority of pre-service English teachers were familiar with the characteristics of TBLT.Moreover,they had the best understanding of the features of teaching procedure,and then the features of language and learning theory.Based on the above findings,in the last chapter,implications for English language teaching were suggested.The present research was not an ultimate one;further study should affirm and conduct the results.And also Comparative studies can be conducted in the future with more samples.Besides methods course,some other courses(four-skills course)should be focused on.