Factors Of SoTL Of College English Teachers

In a very long history, teaching has been valued by universities around the world.However, as science develops and its contribution to a country’s economic and socialprogress becomes more and more significant, an atmosphere has emerged in higherlearning that scientific research is considered valuable and thus more attention is given toit whereas teaching is not as vital thus professors are reluctant to devote much energy toteaching. As this atmosphere develops into a trend in many universities in the US in the1990s, it has become a serious problem and aroused concern of the Carnegie Foundationfor the Advancement of Teaching, which coined the term “Scholarship of Teaching” andestablished its theory, trying to balance the relationship between teaching and researching.The impact the theory has created since then is so widespread that there are so manyuniversities promoting teaching service to its students that it also enables teachers to havemore opportunities to discover problems in their teaching, find solutions to thoseproblems, and increase the quality of teaching.The paper summarizes the core meaning of SoTL based on analyzing relevantliterature research, and then creates a questionnaire to survey college English teachers offour universities in Fuzhou. A model is established by exploratory factor analysis andconfirmatory factor analysis. The model shows that SoTL consists four factors which areteaching learning and researching, teaching communicating, acquiring of teachingfeedback, and professional knowledge. The paper also attempts to discover therelationship between SoTL and English teachers’ academic performance, and the findingis that SoTL has contributory effects on academic performance. The conclusion from thepaper has two-fold significance. The first is for individual English teachers to realize thatwhat kind of teaching behaviors are vital for them to improve their SoTL and thusconducive to their academic performance. The second is for departments of teacherdevelopment to realize what they should do to help teachers to improve their SoTL andtheir academic performance.The paper consists of five parts. Part one is a brief introduction to the researchbackground and how the research question is formed. Part two is the theoretic foundation of the concept of SoTL. In part three, literature research has been carried out to show howthe concept of SoTL develops and what its exact meaning is. Part four is the empiricalstudy of English teachers’ SoTL. Part five concludes the paper and propose a fewsuggestions for both individual teachers and teacher development organizations. The lastpart is a self-reflection on the weakness of this paper and suggests some possibleadditional further research on this topic.