A Study On Rural Middle School English Teacher's Professional Identity

If you want to understand the teacher's profession “inner factor” fully, which requires knowing professional identity. When it comes to the western educational research, the research on teacher's professional identity has been an important part, but it has just begun in China. English teacher's professional identity is becoming an increasingly popular issue. What's more, investigating English teacher's professional identity in rural middle schools has been largely neglected in China.In order to realize the current situation of rural middle school teacher's professional identity, the researcher did a survey among 100 English teachers who come from nineteen rural middle schools in Qingcheng county. The research aims at understanding the general situation of English teacher's professional identity in rural middle schools. Both qualitative and quantitative method are used in analyzing the differences in rural middle school teacher's professional identity in seven aspects of four different dimensions. This research is about teacher's professional inner factors, we can see the development of the rural middle school English teachers, and the better education for them can be promoted.There are six chapters in this thesis. The first part is the introduction. It summarizes the structure of this thesis and does a research on the significance and the background of the selected topic. The second part is the literature review of this thesis. It illustrates all the researches about this topic at home and abroad. The third part of the thesis mainly talks about the theories which support the research. The fourth part is about the research questions, research subjects, research methods, data collection and data analysis. This thesis studies three questions: 1) what's the situation of the rural middle school English teacher's professional identity at present? 2) Are there any differences of rural middle school English teacher's professional identity with different gender, age, teaching years, educational background, professional titles, position and monthly income level? If so, how are they different? 3) What has influenced professional identity of English teachers in rural middle school? This thesis took one hundred English teachers in nineteen rural middle schools in Qingcheng county as the subjects. The survey used the questionnaire to have a test. At the same time, the researcher selected ten teachers to have face-to-face interview randomly. The fifth part of the thesis analyzes and discusses the research results. The last part is mainly about the major findings and the limitations of this research.The results show that: generally speaking, the professional identity of rural middle school English teachers is high. There are some significant differences with different gender, age, teaching years, educational background, position and monthly income level in the four dimensions of professional values, professional sense of belonging, professional behavior tendency and role values, but there is no significant difference on different teaching titles.In short, because of the limited instruments and the number of the subjects are not big enough, this research results can not represent the whole situation of Gansu province. Besides, because the researcher's proficiency and ability, there are lots of questions left to be answered for the further researches.