An Investigation Of Middle School English Teachers' Language Awareness

In the 1980 s,the Language Awareness Movement was put forward primarily by scholars such as Hawkins,aiming to oppose teachers who only considered promoting communicative language teaching and ignored language forms in the UK school curriculum,which resulted in poor writing and reading abilities for many graduates.A large number of scholars also responded to this movement.Since then,language awareness studies have aroused attention among several fields including teacher training and language education.By the end of the 20 th century,Thornbury(1997)proposed the concept of Teacher Language Awareness(TLA),which,according to his opinion,is the language system knowledge of teachers themselves,and it contributes to more effective teaching.Andrews(2001)also indicated that teachers with high levels of TLA could stimulate learners' interest in learning and improve their learning effect.Because of the close relationship between TLA and effective teaching,Chinese scholars have started to pay attention to TLA,but most studies about TLA now are qualitative studies instead of empirical studies.And the focus on TLA research was mainly on teachers' subject-matter knowledge namely the declarative dimension,while the other dimension was ignored.Moreover,most studies have concentrated on the teacher language awareness of university teachers rather than middle school teachers.In order to explore the present levels of middle school English teachers' language awareness,this study was undertaken from two dimensions of TLA.The first being the declarative dimension,which refers to teachers' subject-matter knowledge and the procedural dimension,which is the teachers' communicative language ability.Also,three research instruments were covered in this study: a test paper of teachers' subject-matter knowledge,a questionnaire about teachers' communicative language ability,which was borrowed from Andrews,and an interview.41 English teachers from three different schools in Dali were engaged in the study.SPSS11.5 was used to collect data and descriptive analysis was conducted to analyze the data.The major findings were shown as follows: firstly,the general levels of middle school English teachers' subject-matter knowledge were low,especially in phonetics,culture and discourse analysis.Specifically,teachers from urban schools performed better than teachers from suburban schools;female teachers' level of subject-matter knowledge were higher than male teachers;teachers who earned master degrees had a higher level of subject-matter knowledge than teachers who held bachelor degrees;teachers who had a longer period of teaching experience did better in subject-matter knowledge than those with a shorter period of teaching experience.Secondly,most middle school English teachers had high levels of communicative language ability on most aspects of English teaching.Finally,TLA does influence teachers' pedagogical practice.Specially,teachers with high levels of TLA tended to pay more attention to background information when they were preparing lessons,they also realized the importance of interaction with students,and they preferred speak English during class,diversified methods were used by them to evaluate students' efforts.However,teachers with low levels of TLA focused on grammar and vocabulary during lesson preparation,and they laid their emphasis on explaining teaching contents during class,they preferred speak Chinese in class,they evaluate students' efforts only by the scores of exams.In the light of the above findings,implications for middle school English teaching were put forward.It is urgent for middle school English teachers to improve their subject-matter knowledge and enhance their communicative language ability.The present study was only a tentative one because of the limitations on the number of subjects,the number of interviewees and the test paper of subject-matter knowledge.Therefore,the findings need to be confirmed and complemented by further research.