A Comparative Study On Expert And Novice Senior High English Teachers' Decision Making

With the deepening conduction and development of the quality-oriented education and educational reform,teachers' professional development has been drawing more and more attention and teacher-related researches have been increasing constantly.As an indispensable part in teachers' professional development,researches on teacher decision making have also been attached great importance in recent years.Teacher decision making can be mainly divided into decisions in teaching design stage,teaching implementation stage and teaching reflection stage,all of which determine the effectiveness of classroom teaching.Among relevant researches,most studies abroad focus on the theoretical investigation of teacher decision making and do the researches in English as a Mother Tongue context.Domestic studies mainly introduce those foreign theories,isolating the relationship of all teaching decisions in different teaching stages,and lack comparison of expert and novice teachers' decision making concerning specific subjects.Therefore,studies on contributing factors for different decision making based on the comparison of two types of teachers are few.Consequently,the present research combines teacher decision making with English subject focusing on teachers' decision making in English as a Foreign Language context,and adopts the method of case study and contrastive analysis aiming to investigate differences in decision making between expert and novice senior high English teachers into three teaching stages.In addition,contributing factors for these teaching decisions are explored and analyzed so that hopefully constructive and practical suggestions for promoting effectiveness of English teacher decision making will be put forward.The present study aims to address the following three questions.(1)Are there any differences in decision making between expert and noviceEnglish teachers in senior high school? If there are,what are the differences?(2)What factors contribute to senior high English teachers' decision making?(3)How can we promote the effectiveness of English teachers' decision making?The subjects involved in the case study are Two Senior One English teachers(anexpert teacher and a novice teacher)from Wuhu No.1 Middle School.Meanwhile,66 English teachers(12 expert teachers and 24 novice teachers included)from different senior high schools of six cities in Anhui province participate in the questionnaire survey entitled The Status Quo Investigation of Senior High School English Teachers' Decision Making.The research instruments include class observation,interview(pre-class interview and post-class interview),questionnaire and document analysis.All of class observation and interviews are recorded and transcribed selectively into textual form,and the teaching documents(teaching designs,lesson powerpoints,teaching journals,etc.)collected are classified,coded and analyzed to draw conclusions.The major findings of the present study are as follows.Firstly,there exist distinct differences in decision making between expert and novice senior high English teachers in teaching design stage,teaching implementation stage and teaching reflection stage.There are differences in their adoption of teaching media,setting of teaching objectives and arrangement of teaching contents in teaching design stage.Strategies they adopted when managing classroom discipline,correcting students' language errors in teaching implementation stage are also significantly different from each other.And in teaching reflection stage,their decisions vary from reflecting forms,contents to methods.Secondly,contributing factors for English teacher decision making consist of intrinsic factors(teacher knowledge,practical wisdom and teacher beliefs)and extrinsic factors(teaching environment).Thirdly,based on the contributing factors,both school and English teacher themselves are responsible for and can make some efforts in promoting the effectiveness of teacher decision making from their respective positions.