A Case Study Of Novice Senior High School English Teachers' Pedagogical Content Knowledge Of Reading

Teachers are not only entitled to possess solid disciplinary content knowledge and generic pedagogical knowledge, more importantly, they need a good command of subject-specific pedagogical knowledge which is highly relevant to practical experience. American educationist L. Shulman(1987) termed this knowledge as pedagogical content knowledge(PCK) and asserted it is at the heart of teachers' professional competence. PCK is defined as pedagogically reformulation of subject content knowledge in the way students have easy access to it.The previous studies mainly focus on the source, components, and models of PCK but few studies have explored the PCK related to the specific language skill, for example, reading pedagogical content knowledge. Therefore,this study is intended to investigate the reading PCK performance in English teaching.What is reading PCK for teachers of English as foreign language? How is it formed ? There have been research addressing such questions on both well-experienced teachers and novice teachers. This study is intended for the latter by observing two novice teachers in teaching practices for one month to explore the reading Pedagogical Content Knowledge performance based on the the reading PCK framework put forward by Richard Kiely(2015).The study mainly is aimed at answering two research questions: “What do the two novice teachers' reading Pedagogical Content Knowledge demonstrated in their classroom teaching?” “What is the two novice English teachers' cognition about reading Pedagogical Content Knowledge? The writer made an in-depth exploration and analysis on the two novice teachers' teaching practice through various kinds of data-collection procedures:classroom observation, post-interview, audio recording and teaching materials.By analyzing the data of the two novice teachers, the study finally finds :(1) two novice teachers show fairly comprehensive understanding about the three stages of reading instruction in theory but they are weak in designing the teaching activities based on the needs of students.(2) In the reading strategy, two novice teachers both have extensive knowledge of reading strategy but they are not flexible enough to select the appropriate strategy at the right time.(3) The two novice teachers both have not equipped enough knowledge on reading genre. According to the reading PCK performance by the two novice teachers, some pedagogical implications can be gained from the three aspects: to increase the practice knowledge, lay emphasis on the accumulation of teaching experience and teaching reflection, to communicate with the expert teachers and learning from them.