A Study Of The Classroom Roles Of Comprehensive English Teachers

This dissertation aims at studying and hopefully establishing, at least tentatively, the classroom roles of Comprehensive English teachers. To support the establishment of the classroom roles, we carried out investigations into the current roles the teacher plays, students expectations of the teachers, the correlations between the teacher roles and the students' achievements. The findings are (1) that the teachers still play dominantly role of lecturer, (2) that there exist gaps between the teacher roles and the students expectations, and (3) that the effect of motivator, facilitator and affect regulator is positive on the achievement of the students' written test and to a certain degree on those of the oral test, but lecturer has no significant effect on the written test and marginally negative on the oral test. On the basis of the findings of these investigations, five main roles of Comprehensive English teachers are tentatively set up, discussed and described. They are lecturer, motivator, facilitator, affection regulator and creator of environment, in addition to controller, organizer, assessor, participant, resource, learner strategy trainer, investigator and researcher. The possible causes of the gaps between the teacher roles and the students' expectations are probed into for the implementations the appropriate roles. The factors that account for the gaps are both the teachers and the students. Teacher factors are traditional notion of education, lack of quality and teachers' ignorance of students' expectations which is the result of unawareness of the significance of researches. On the students' side, passive and test-oriented learning may widen the gaps. The suggested solutions are teachers' transformation of educational beliefs, in-service training on education theories, SLA theories, refreshing of knowledge on a regular basis in order to bridge the gaps and increase teaching and learning effect, training of students learning strategies and helping students set up right learning goals and attitude, etc.