| This is a combining theoretical and empirical study of the demands of mathematics professional literacy of high school mathematics teachers.The new mathematics curriculum reform makes it an intensive focus on how to improve the mathematics professional literacy of high school mathematics teachers in the fields of mathematics teachers'education and professional development. So, the urgent problem is to outline what's the teachers'needs in mathematics professional literacy for high quality mathematics teaching. But, at present, there are still few researches of this either in theoretical or in empirical aspect in our country. And the systematic study about it is more inadequate. This has made it an obstacle to the mathematics teachers'education and professional development. This study helps to understand the needs of mathematics teachers'mathematics professional literacy completely; it also provides a potential theory framework for designing, measuring and evaluating mathematics teachers'mathematics professional literacy; what's more, it gives a common discourse system for teachers and teacher educators to modify their instruction practice.The aim of this study consists of four aspects: (1) to identify the specific needs of high school mathematics teachers for high quality mathematics teaching; (2) to measure the recognition of the perceived level of importance and mastery of the mathematics professional literacy of each teacher and the relationship between perceived importance and perceived mastery taking by the practice teachers in Henan province as the examples; (3) to measure the influence of the demographic variables on the importance and mastery; (4) to construct a framework describing the demands of mathematics teachers'mathematics professional literacy and explaining the meaning of it.For solving these questions, the method for collecting data in this study is a questionnaire, and the interview is also applied as an auxiliary. There are three basic stages to complete the study: (1) according to a conceptual framework derived from literatures and theory research, interviews of 4 expert mathematics teacher educators and 4 expert high school mathematics teachers, and a pilot study, the instrument--a questionnaire of teachers is developed to collect the data; (2) distribution of the instrument to a stratified random sample of 679 high school mathematics teachers in Henan, analyzing the quantitative data by using SPSS15.0 and coding the contents which needed to be revised and added according to teachers'views; (3) fixing the contents and establishing the framework for describing mathematics teachers'mathematics professional literacy and illuminating the contents.The research results and conclusions are as the following: (1) A framework is established for describing mathematics teachers'professional literacy of mathematics, including mathematical knowledge, mathematical competencies and mathematical affect with three-dimensions, 8 types and 47 items, and its contents and organization are illuminated; (2) By observing the first ten items and the last ten items, which are ranked according to importance and relating to the contents, it is found that the most important mathematics professional literacy ranked by the teachers are those requirements reflected in traditional mathematics syllabus, such as,"Spatial visualization competencies (No.1)"and"operating and solving competencies (No.2)", while the less important are related to the knowledge of views of mathematics, such as,"the nature of mathematics (countdown to the first)"and"the evolutions of mathematics nature caused by the development of technology (penultimate)"; A strong significant positive relationship (Spearman's rank correlation =.954, Significant at the .01 level) is found between the perceived importance and the perceived mastery; every item has significant higher means on the level of importance than on the level of mastery (at the .01 level); (3) Demographic variables has little or no influence on the ratings of perceived importance, but has some significant influence (7 items) on perceived mastery(at the .01 level). The results throw some light on the teachers or teacher educators : (1) The mathematics professional literacy of high school mathematics teachers from all three dimensions in this research should be improved; (2) The components of mathematics professional literacy which teachers perceived very important should be strengthened continually; (3) The knowledge of mathematical views and mathematical structures should be paid more attention to; (4) Teachers who engage in learning knowledge related to mathematics and technology should be encouraged ; (5) The strategies for turning mathematical knowledge into applied mathematical competences need to be developed; (6) The potential functions of experience variables in nurturing teachers'mathematics professional literacy need to be cultivated.The innovation of this research lies mainly in the following aspects: (1) The concept of mathematics professional literacy is put forward: a synthesis and unified entity which consists of three dimensions in mathematical knowledge, mathematical competencies and mathematical affects. The structure and components of the three dimensions are also defined respectively, such as, mathematical knowledge including the mathematical contents and the hidden ideas in it, the mathematical views and mathematical structure; mathematical competencies including the basic mathematical competencies, posing, analyzing and solving mathematical problem competences, and dealing with and using mathematical language competences; and mathematical affects including the learning inclination to mathematics and the professional self of mathematics. (2) A completed theory framework for describing mathematics teachers'mathematics professional literacy has been developed. (3) Six pieces of insight for teachers, teacher education and professional development operators in their efforts to improve professional practice among teachers have also been obtained from this study.
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