A Comparison Study On Language Awareness Of Junior Middle School English Teachers And Undergraduates In TESL

With the implementation of the New English Curriculum Standards, the basiceducation reform has put forward a higher demand to English teachers, includingEnglish language awareness (LA). Wang Qi (2004) proposes that highly qualifiedteacher is the primary important factor for primary and secondary school Englisheducation development, and believes that the improvement of teachers’ LA canguarantee the further development of English teaching in primary and middle schools.In addition，there exists common phenomenon among the middle school students oreven the undergraduates in TESL in normal university who have solid languageknowledge, can get high scores in exam, but perform poorly in the real Englishcommunication contexts and their output ability is limited; or they can expressfluently in English but ignore the language form. Many scholars have pointed out thismay be attributed to the lack of LA. However, as for normal university, its goal andresponsibility is to cultivate qualified or even outstanding primary and secondaryschool English teachers. The level of undergraduates in TESL can not only reflect thepedagogical level and competence of normal university but also deeply influence theteaching career they will take up. Therefore, the development of LA is significant forboth the in-service teachers and the undergraduates in TESL. And it has become adeterminant factor of English teaching and also a hot research topic in the field ofEnglish teaching in recent years.Research on LA initially focuses on teachers’ LA training, but domesticresearches lack the comparative study of different stages of teachers, and also less onthe research perspective, such as the correlation study between language form andfunction (the two key aspects of LA), LA and gender, LA and language proficiency,and the comparative study on related aspects of LA between pre-service andin-service English teachers. In view of this, this article will focus on the comparisonand correlation of the above aspects with an empirical investigation.This thesis firstly introduces the concept, development and related theoreticalbasis of LA. Then it comes to an empirical study with some junior middle schoolEnglish teachers from Ganzhou city of Jiangxi province and some undergraduates inTESL (third-year) in Gannan Normal University as the subjects. Paper test and interview used in this research aim to probe the correlation of language form andfunction, LA and language proficiency and gender; to explore the contrast, differenceson the related aspects of LA between junior middle school English teachers andundergraduates in TESL; to find out the changes on LA after graduation for in-serviceEnglish teachers; to obtain the enlightenment through the data analysis; and at last toput forward some suggestions for the development of LA to the in-service Englishteachers and the undergraduates in TESL. The results show that the junior middleschool English teachers and undergraduates in TESL have significant differences onLA. Key middle school English teachers are found to be more aware of LA thanordinary middle school English teachers and undergraduates. LA and Englishproficiency exist significant correlation, so do the awareness of language form andfunction (though there’s no significant correlation on the language form and functionfor junior undergraduates). Gender doesn’t significantly correlate with LA. Theresults confirm the original theoretical assumption, find out something different anddrawback of the pre-service education on teachers as well. Based on the results, theauthor tries to offer some references and suggestions for English language teachingand cultivation of LA for English teachers, especially for the middle school Englishteachers and the undergraduates in TESL. Besides, research deficiency of this studyand the future research tendency are also pointed out.