On Professional Development Approaches For English Teachers At Senior Middle Schools

From relevant studies about English teacher education field, it is concluded that English teachers at senior middle schools should bear the following professionalisms. They must be good at English. Their competence of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating should be high. Above all, they must be able to completely express themselves in English and their accent must be as perfect as possible. In addition to English competence, English teachers should also learn about some theories about foreign language methodology, foreign language acquisition and linguistics. In order to polish their teaching, it's necessary for them to know English-learners' learning psychology, the culture and social customs about main English speaking countries. What's more, English teachers should master information technology and employ multi-media facilities to aid their teaching. Meanwhile, they should persist in pursuing self-development for their whole career life.The English teachers at senior middle schools can employ many approaches to develop above-mentioned professionalisms such as, off-job study in a university, attending short-term training course and pursuing in-service advancement. But the reality is that most of the English teachers at senior middle schools can not leave their job to attend any training course ,what they can do is only to try to develop themselves when they are at work. What's more, it is impossible for them to develop themselves in a short term. That's a long-term process. In order to develop themselves, the English teachers must persist in self—teaching, reflecting their teaching practice and doing action research for the whole career life. Based on what is mentioned above, this paper focuses on how the English teachers at senior middle schools develop themselves in-service through self-teaching, reflection and action research.Firstly, guided by relevant studies, this paper states that the English teachers at senior middle schools should develop themselves when they are at work through self-teaching, reflection of their teaching practice and action research. Then, the author makes up some questions for the semi-structured interview with three English teachers at senior middle schools, two of whom are famous for their high-quality teaching. It is found from the analysis of the interview that the reason for their success is that they havebeen persisting in self-teaching, reflecting on their teaching practice and doing action research to develop themselves for their career life, which verifies the author's ideas.Based on the above, the author proposes that the English teachers at middle schools should be encouraged to develop themselves and the school should provide necessary conditions for their development.