| Research of teachers’knowledge has become popular since 1980s when Shulman proposed seven categories of teachers’knowledge as the request of teaching professionalization movement in America. Among those seven categories of knowledge, there is one category named Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), which is the focus of researches in the following years. When exploring teacher’s PCK, knowledge of students is one aspect some researchers focused on.The purpose of my study is to explore an experienced college English teacher’s PCK about students. The research object in my study is an experienced college English teacher called Miss Tang. My study was responsive to two research questions: what should an experienced college English teacher know about her students before she teaches them How does she know that During my study, I used semi-structured interview, classroom observation and stimulated recall interview to collect data. At the same time, I delivered copies of a questionnaire to 21 students in that class in order to get supplementary data to support my findings.Through data collection and data analysis, I found an experienced college teacher knows students’readiness before learning specific content, language learning speed of different students; students’typical patterns of understanding; students’learning style and learning strategy; student’s interest and motivation about what they are learning; students’personal characters and life.An experienced college English teacher understands her students more and better than others, because she keeps on studying English, linguistic theories, language teaching methods and applied linguistic research methods and so on. Teaching practice is the most important sources of PCK about students and with richer teaching experience, a teacher can know more about students when learning specific content. A teacher should keep positive attitudes to teaching and update information about young people consistently. |
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