The Pursuit Of Teacher Professional Development

Chinese government has launched a new National ELT Curriculum Standard for Compulsory Education (NCS) which ambitiously aims to reform China's English teaching. Teachers, as the main decision makers at the classroom level, are central to the improvement of English language teaching in China. Therefore, teachers are the key to the success of the educational reform. Under such circumstance, great importance should be attached to teacher professional development in order to ensure teacher qualification, teaching efficiency as well as the effect of the educational reform.In order to explore the professional development of the experienced secondary EFL teachers in their socio-cultural context and to understand the professional needs of novice teachers so as to make effective suggestions about how novice teachers can be assisted to attain their professional goals in their respective context and how teaching context can be improved to facilitate teaching, the study launches case studies about four EFL teachers, including two experienced teachers and two novice teachers, by inquiring into their individual teaching and developing experience through narrative methods.After inquiring into teachers'experience, the following conclusions have been made that:1) with professional development, teacher belief and knowledge will change and evolve accordingly which largely influence their teaching practice; 2) novice teachers should actively devote themselves to varying development programs and research work in order to pursue their development; 3) teaching context will be a decisive factor facilitating or constraining teacher professional development.