Reflective Teaching:a Journey In Pursuit Of Professional Development Of English Teachers

This thesis aims to develop a reflective approach to achieving professional development for English teachers as it is becoming widely accepted that the quality of teachers is crucial to the success of education of English with the deepening of foreign language education reform. Although the notion of reflection has become gradually popular in western countries since1930s when John Dewey first proposed "reflection" in education, however, Chinese scholars did not seem to have much contact with the theories to do with "reflection" in education until1980s. Teachers find it time consuming and energy consuming to apply "reflection" to their practice while the outcomes turn out to be unsatisfactory.Based on the ground of psychological and educational theories, namely, constructivism, meta-cognition and humanism and their enlightenments on reflective teaching and professional development of English teachers, I conduct my study, mainly focusing on how teachers of English could achieve their professional development effectively through reflective teaching. With the literature reviewed, key issues on professional development have been discussed and challenges that are facing professional development of English teachers in China have been presented. As a result, it urgently calls for English teachers to adapt themselves to the new educational contexts and meet the challenges through reflective teaching, on which both theoretical and empirical studies have been introduced through the review of literature.Reflective cycle is a key component in reflective teaching toward professional development of English teachers. And it is assumed that the reflective cycle works differently among English teachers with different backgrounds and from different school contexts. How does reflective teaching of English teachers contribute to their professional development? What are the factors that have great impact on their reflective teaching? How can the teachers of English be more reflective and achieve their fruitful development in their teaching career? Bearing these questions in my mind, this paper carried out both quantitative and qualitative studies, in which questionnaire, class observations, open-ended questions and teachers’ reflective journals are included. The analysis of the quantitative study through Windows SPSS11.5suggests that reflective teaching has a lot to do with such factors as teaching experiences and titles of different English teachers. School context is another factor which has impact on reflective teaching. As a good complement for the quantitative study, the descriptive analysis of the data collected in the qualitative study suggests that most of the English teachers stay at the technical or practical level with much focus on the "object" by either expressing the problems or solving the problem for an utilitarian purpose. Fewer reach critical reflection and focus on the "self". At the end of the paper, implications of the study on teacher evaluation system and collaborative reflective teaching have been probed into to achieve the same goal---professional development of English teachers. Lastly, it needs further research to perfect the present study.