A Comparative Study On PCK Between Interdisciplinary And Non-interdisciplinary Masters Of English Education

The concept of Pedagogical Content Knowledge(PCK)was first brought up by Shulman in 1896.In recent years,PCK has become one of several heated topics of research on professional development for educators.As the core and soul of professional knowledge,PCK is the practical knowledge required of teachers to carry out and achieve effective teaching.To some extent,the mastery of PCK affects the future teachers' teaching competency and teaching practice.As a reserve force for highly qualified teachers,Masters of English Education are facing stricter requirements.Although the current research on PCK is rich,the research results focusing on the entire group of Masters of English Education are insufficient.The problems existing in the training of Masters of English Education in PCK still need to be studied and paid attention to.This study focuses on three research questions:(1)What is the actual situation of PCK for Masters of English Education?(2)What are the differences in PCK between non-interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary Masters of English Education?(3)How can Masters of English Education improve their PCK in current situation?On the basis of existing research,this study investigates the current situation of the Masters of English Education in Central China Normal University from five dimensions of English target knowledge,subject knowledge,teaching strategy knowledge,context knowledge,and self-reflection knowledge to analyze the situation.The author also compares the non-interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary Masters of English Education from various dimensions of PCK.The results show that on the whole the mastery of PCK of the Masters of English Education is not optimistic,and non-interdisciplinary masters are better than interdisciplinary masters in all the five dimensions.In general,Masters of English Education have weaker grasp of English teaching objective knowledge and better mastery of self-reflection knowledge.And they have various degrees of deficiency in English subject matter knowledge,teaching strategy knowledge and context knowledge.Based on the analysis,the author suggests that in the process of the training of the Masters of English Education,the universities and masters should take effective measures from five dimensions to improve their mastery of PCK,so as to promote their professional development.