A Study Of The Effect Of Training Foreign Language Teachers With A Reflective Model

The notion of reflection is now very popular in the field of teacher education around the world. Scholars in the field of second/foreign language teacher education have also increasingly recognized the importance of teachers' implicit knowledge and reflection for the past decade. However, few studies were found about the impact of teacher education programs related to second/foreign language teachers' implicit knowledge and reflection. It is therefore the intention of this study to study the effect of a short INSET (in-service training) course administered in Guangdong which apparently employs a reflective model in terms of either the course design or the training process.The effect of the course is studied in terms of to what extent the trainees had achieved the course aims. According to works on conceptualization of teachers' knowledge by Richards (1990,1998), Freeman & Johnson (1998), Johnson & Golombek (2002) and works on reflection, reflective model of training foreign language teachers and reflective traits by Dewey (1910), Schon (1983,1987), Bartlett (1990), Wallace (1991), Ur(1992, 1996),Jarvis (1992)and Richards (1998), teachers make their own decisions according to their own personal theories/implicit knowledge and contexts. Therefore, the goal of teacher education is to renew teachers' implicit knowledge and to develop their reflectivity by engaging them in reflection. The more reflective they become, the more they could personalize/internalize the external course input; the more they could develop their reflective ability, the better they could learn from their own experience by reflection when they are back in their own contexts.The present study adopts qualitative research methods to collect and analyze data. The data collected include open ended questionnaires, learning journals written by the trainees and ethnographies based on observation notes made on the spot about the trainees' trying out of the techniques introduced in the course at the end of the course. After grounded analysis of data from each source, the categories emerged from the each data source were coded and analyzed separately using the conceptualframework devived from the literature review before triangulation and comparisons of findings from different sources were made to draw the final conclusion.Findings from the three different sources of data enable me to draw the final conclusion that the course has helped all trainees to achieve the course aims to some extent and has helped the majority of the trainees to achieve the course aims to a large extent, which means that the trainees evidenced reflective traits and development of reflectivity not only cognitively (verbally) in their answers to the questionnaires and in their learning journals, but also behaviorally in their trying out of the techniques at the end of the course.The present study provides some pedagogical implications for foreign language teacher education: an INSET course for foreign language teachers as short as 15 days can help most of the trainees to achieve the course aims to a large extent if the course makes good use of the reflective model of training foreign language teachers. Other implications are related to course material writing, trainer training, training course management.