A Narrative Inquiry Into Inexperienced English Teachers' Personal Knowledge Of Teaching Practice

Personal knowledge of teaching practice is the basis of teacher development. It has its root in teachers' previous teaching and learning experience, guides their daily teaching, and influences their prospective teaching. It reflects teachers' educational beliefs and is a constant developing process. Therefore, we must sink deep into teachers' daily teaching life to investigate their personal knowledge of teaching practice.Due to its close connection with personal experience, narrative inquiry, which is a new method for education research, is employed as the research method of this study. Researchers view narrative inquiry as the study of experience as story, which is first and foremost a way of thinking about experience. By carrying out a narrative inquiry into an inexperienced English teacher Wang Lin's daily teaching life, the present study aims to investigate inexperienced English teachers' embedding personal knowledge of teaching practice.Based on the theories of humanism, constructivism, reflective teaching and action research, this study addresses the following issues:(1) What are the underlying meanings of the stories in the narrative inquiry of Wang Lin? (2) What are the factors that influence the construction of Wang Lin' personal knowledge of teaching practice? (3) How to better the development of inexperienced English teachers' personal knowledge of teaching practice? A narrative inquiry is employed to carry out the present research. The participant teacher Wang Lin is from Wuyi High Middle School in Hebei province. And this narrative inquiry consists of three steps: firstly, conducting fieldwork: classroom observation, individual interviews, narrative stories collection and other related materials collection procedures are carried on in this period; then, composing field texts: all the collected materials are classified, organized and transcribed into field texts; at last, conveying research results: the transcribed data are analyzed and discussed, during which the above research questions are answered.The findings of this study show that inexperienced English teachers' personal knowledge of teaching practice runs in their daily teaching life automatically, and it is always in a dilemma because teachers' educational beliefs and teaching behaviours usually disagree with each other; Both the internal and external factors influence the development of inexperienced English teachers' personal knowledge of teaching practice; To enhance the development of inexperienced English teachers' personal knowledge of teaching practice, inexperienced English teachers themselves should try their best to be reflective teachers and teacher researchers, and the society and schools should adopt effective measures to promote inexperienced English teachers' innovation abilities.The implications of the present study include: The research makes inexperienced English teachers' voice being heard by employing the research method of narrative inquiry; The study is beneficial to arouse inexperienced English teachers' subject consciousness and evoke people's attention on their daily teaching life; This study and analysis of personal knowledge of teaching practice benefit inexperienced English teachers' professional development a lot; It proves that narrative inquiry is an effective research method for exploring inexperienced English teachers' personal knowledge of teaching practice; And it can enrich the further study of teacher education and teacher development.