Research On American Foreign Language Teachers' "Professional Development Plan"

Along with the development of the age,more and more people in academic area think that teaching as a profession not only has the function of "educating others",but also the function of"educating oneself'.Only if the teachers have high ability of "educating themselves",teachers will be likely to better achieve the goal of "educating others".More and more attention from society is attached on the teachers' professional development.Foreign language teachers'professional development is significant to the improvement of the overall quality of foreign language teaching.Up to now,we have to admit that there are many problems in Chinese foreign language teachers' professional development models.How to improve the quality of foreign language teachers' professional development in our country is a frequently discussed topic.The author of this paper focus on the American foreign language teachers' Professional Development Plans.American teachers' Professional Development Plan is not only a way of developmental teacher evaluation,but also a teacher professional development way,which is widely used in the United States in recent years.Based on the researches of teacher's professional development,the author of this paper firstly questionnaire 75 foreign language teachers from North Carolina and interviewed 4 foreign language teachers and 1 middle school principle.The using process of Professional Development-Plan is introduced.The usefulness of American foreign language teachers' Professional Development Plans is analyzed.And some systemic,pertinent and effective of strategies for promoting the development of Chinese foreign language teachers' professional development is given.Through SPSS software,the foreign language teachers' degree of recognition toward Professional Development Plan from the dimensions of fairness,usefulness,flexibility and accuracy is analyzed.Then,the differences degree between different grade and different teaching experience length are Wilcoxon-tested.To what extent the Professional Development Plan affects teachers' professional development is analyzed.The analysis results show that:foreign language teachers recognize that Professional Development Plan has fairness,practicability and flexibility,but less recognize that professional development plan can accurately reflect the performance of their teaching;The farther grade and teaching length gap,the greater the difference between foreign language teachers' degree of recognition of Professional Development Plan is;Teachers whose teaching length is below 10 years and primary school teachers' recognition degree for Professional Development Plan are relatively high;about 80%of the foreign language teachers think that Professional Development Plan indeed promote their professional development,but around 20%of the foreign language teachers don't agree that Professional Development Plan promotes their professional development at all.Integrating the results of questionnaire and interview survey,some conclusions can be drawn:from the perspective of teacher evaluation,the Professional Development Plan helps foreign language teachers to promote their initiative and enthusiasm in the evaluation process,but Professional Development Plan cannot accurately reflect the foreign language teachers' teaching performance;from the perspective of professional development way,Professional Development Plan promotes the teachers' constantly self-reflection;the model of principal-responsible,mentor-lead,colleagues-cooperation provides the external guarantee for teacher's professional development;but the unified standards limit the content of teachers' professional development.At the end of this paper,Suggestions are put forward for foreign language teachers' professional development track in our country,from the perspectives of standards development,autonomy,diversity,professional development supporting system,evaluation method,leadership and scientific research innovation.