A Case Study Of PCK Cultural Knowledge Comparison Between Junior High School English Novice Teachers And Expert Teachers

Cultural knowledge of PCK is an indispensable part of teachers' pedagogical content knowledge(PCK).But there is a few research on cultural knowledge of PCK and there is a lack of comparative research on cultural knowledge of PCK between novice teachers and expert teachers.This study adopts quantitative and qualitative methods and aims to analyze the ways to acquire the culture knowledge of PCK and the level of it,and find out how novice and expert teachers use their culture knowledge of PCK from the following 4 aspects: the time of culture teaching,the content of culture teaching,the methods of culture teaching and the organization of culture teaching,so as to enrich the research content of the culture knowledge of teachers' PCK and give middle school English teachers some inspiration on how to use their culture knowledge of PCK to improve students' intercultural communicative competence.The subjects are 2 novice teachers and 2 expert teachers from a middle school of Qufu and the research instruments are classroom observation,questionnaire and interview.The questionnaire,used to analyze these four teachers' acquiring way and the level of cultural knowledge of PCK.And this questionnaire is adapted from the questionnaire of primary study of pedagogical knowledge,which is written by Liu Qinghua.The reliability of the questionnaire is0.729.Then the author collect some classroom recording,which is composed of 38 lessons of 4teachers.Next the author uses transcription to transfer the recording.With the help of the recording,the author analyzes their own characteristics in the time of culture teaching,the content of culture teaching,the methods of culture teaching and the organization of culture teaching and summary their similarities and differences as well.Finally,the author conducts a semi-structured interview about the questions founded in the classroom observation with each teacher,which lasts for about an hour.With the help of the interview,the author analyzes why there are differences in the culture knowledge of PCK between novice teachers and that of the expert teachers.The results of this research show that both novice teachers and expert teachers have following difference in the next four aspects.First,there is no difference in the way for acquiring the culture knowledge between novice teachers and expert teachers,but novice teachers pay more attention on the accumulation of cultural knowledge,which means novice teachers' sense of cultural knowledge accumulation is stronger than that of novice teachers.Second,novice teachers have richer knowledge in the aspect of amusement and eating habits than expert teachers,but expert teachers have more knowledge about cross-culture communication than novice teachers,which shows that there are unbalanced reserves in all aspects of cultureknowledge between novice teachers and expert teachers.Thirdly,there is little difference between the novice teachers and the expert teachers in the time-spending of culture teaching.Then in the content of cultural knowledge,novice teachers teach more cultural knowledge about local customs and lifestyle,while expert teachers focus on emotion teaching.Next,as to the teaching methods of cultural knowledge,novice teachers use more teaching strategies than expert teachers in class.In addition,as the organization of cultural knowledge,novice teachers often use the form of group-activities and partner-activities,and expert teachers usually use individual-activities.All these 4 aspects show that the expert teachers neglect the teaching design of cultural knowledge because of the heavy teaching task,but they still can integrate the cultural knowledge into the daily teaching with the help of their teaching experience,and the novice teachers have strong sense of cross-cultural communication and are good at creating active classroom atmosphere through exploring new teaching methods.This study enriches the teacher's PCK theory,and provides some enlightenment to improve the English culture teaching for middle school English teachers.At the same time,there are some limitations in this study,for example,the number of research objects are relatively small,the research time is short,and the research frame is not systematic enough.Future research can make up for these shortcomings by extending observation time,expanding research volume and scope,and improving research frame.