A Comparative Study On Language Awareness Of In-service And Pre-service Middle School English Teachers

Since the early 1980 s,language awareness has become a major concern in language education.Scholars not only stress language awareness of students or learners,but also pay much attention to teachers' language awareness.When the subject of awareness switches to teachers from learners,teacher language awareness(TLA)comes forth.It is found that more aware a teacher is of language and how it works,the better students will learn TLA consists of subject-matter knowledge,communicative language ability and pedagogical content knowledge,which are combined together to facilitate effective language teaching.TLA helps qualified teachers realize that there are three roles for them to act-that is,language users,language analysts and language teachers,which accelerate teacher professional development.This study tries to compare the TLA of middle school English teachers and postgraduates of English teaching,especially from these three perspectives: the user domain,the analyst domain,and the teacher domain.The TLA test and the questionnaire were adopted from previous questionnaires.The participants are 77 middle school English teachers from more than 8 middle schools,and 78 senior postgraduates of English language teaching.The results reveal some problems and implications: 1.The level of subjects' level of grammar and pronunciation is much better than the level of pragmatics,imbalanced development among pronunciation,pragmatics and grammar.2.Both the middle school English teachers'(in-service teachers')and the English language Teaching postgraduates'(pre-service teachers')TLA are at an about average level.3.There is no vital difference between in-service teachers and pre-service teachers for user domain,but with significant difference in teacher domain and analyst domain.4.Although both in-service teachers and pre-service teachers are eager to improve their TLA,they are restricted by some realistic difficulties such as limited training opportunities,not enough guided teaching training,unreasonable course design.Both pre-service and in-service teachers should put the concept of life-long learning into practice;schools should provide in-service teachers more opportunities to improve their TLA,and normal universities should design their courses more carefully.