Investigation And Research On Senior English Teachers’ Professional Development In Ganzhou

The latest national curriculum reform attaches great importance to promoting primary and secondary school teachers’ professional development,encourages teachers to do research on the problems they meet in their teaching and grows to be research teachers.Many primary and secondary school teachers are rich in teaching experience after a long time of teaching practice,but poor in teaching theories and research.At present,in China the professional status and value of senior English teachers have not been recognized and treasured.The professional standards and qualification certification of English teachers remain to be standardized.Much needs to be done to the environment and the systematic construction that promote English teachers’ professional development.All these call for wider and deeper research in senior English teachers’ professional development.My thesis chooses the theories of teachers’ professional development as support and the theories of lifelong learning,constructivism and action research as theoretic base and guide.It adopts literature study,questionnaire and interview as research instruments and uses qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis to analyze the collected information and data.It chooses the in-service English teachers,heads of English teaching group and school leaders in charge of teaching in the senior middle schools(8 schools)in the urban areas of Ganzhou as research subjects.My investigation and research involve English teachers’ basic information,professional knowledge,professional ability and emotional attitude and value,the consciousness of professional development,their demand for professional development and positive and negative influential factors.81 questionnaires are given out and 67 are available.The data are analyzed by using percentage methods and the returned questionnaires have a broad representation.Through the investigation and data analysis,as far as the teachers in the urban senior middle schools in Ganzhou are concerned,this study holds that the age structure seems to be young,that the majority of them have professional titles of second –level teachers or senior teachers and that they received four-year college education or obtained a master’s degree;that the majority of them have been teaching for more than six years and can use multimedia to teach simply.However,their social status not being fully recognized,great work amount and pressure lead to low job satisfaction.Some teachers experience occupation burnout and are lacking in professional development drive.In addition,due to the poor guiding role of the education administration,it leads to the imperfect situation of sex ratio.Furthermore,there are many self problems in their professional development.Some teachers lack professional knowledge such as second language acquisition theories and knowledge in pedagogy and psychology.Their professional abilities such as using computers skillfully and teaching in English need to be improved.Some teachers are short of awareness of professional development.At the same time,schools don’t attach great importance to school-based research and teachers’ in-service training.Teachers’ appraisal systems are inappropriate because they pay too much attention to students’ academic achievements.Besides,due to the shortage of education funds,few chances are given to teachers to receive in-service training and the chances are unbalanced;and it also results in the situation that the training content and form can’t be closely combined with the teachers’ practical needs.The study holds that English teachers’ professional development in the urban senior middle schools in Ganzhou is restricted by their own factors and the external factors of the school and the education department.Thus,to prompt the professional development and improve English education in the schools,we should pay close attention to the professional development of English teachers from two perspectives,namely the internal factors and external guarantee.Firstly,the teachers themselves should develop the consciousness for professional development and place emphasis on increasing their professional knowledge,their professional ability and professional standard in learning,reflective teaching and action research to improve their professional development.Secondly,the school leaders should continuously renovate their educational ideas,establish the concept of teachers’ professional development,strengthen school-based research and teachers’ in-service training and enhance the targeted feature and the actual effect of the training content.Finally,the education department should raise teachers’ salary standard and allocate more special financial fund to guarantee the money needed to prompt teachers’ professional development.Improving English teachers’ qualities and promoting English teachers’ professional development not only meet the realistic need of improving students’ integrated qualities of English and the need of getting out of the dilemma that English teaching is time-consuming and inefficient but also help teachers grow personally,exert their potential and realize their value of life.It is of great positive realistic significance.