Beyond Teaching: An Exploratory Survey Of University EFL Teachers' Beliefs And The Processes Of Professional Development

This study is a component of an on-going research project on EFL teacher professional development, sponsored by Honghe University in Yunnan Province. The project is, similar to that of led by Wu Yi'an in Beijing Foreign Studies University, is conceived against a scene of educational reform in China, especially which features a major curriculum review in tertiary English as a subject of learning. As a result, a new English language cuniculum in tertiary level, along with National Cuniculum for ELT for Compulsory Education (revised edition, 2004) and National Curriculum for ELT for Senior Middle School Education (experimental edition, 2003), has been produced and put to experiment: Cuniculum Requirements for University Non-major English Education (experimental edition, 2004)(MOE, 2004). Different from the prior College English Education Syllabus, the new "Requirements" allow local universities to develop their own curriculum systems according to the actual conditions in their own schools.Since the 1980s, with the beginning of the turn from doing research on teachers to teachers as researchers, the role of teachers in EFL teaching and learning is becoming widely noticed. It has been assumed that teachers' views about language, their beliefs about language teaching and learning, about learners and themselves—known as teachers...