A Research Of Junior Middle School English Teachers’Interactive Decision-Making

Since the1970s, with the increasing researches on teachers, researchers began to attach importance to investigate on how teachers’ decisions affect students’ learning. Teaching is decision-making and teachers are decision-makers. Teaching is the process in which the teacher continuously makes decisions. To some extent, effective teaching equals to reasonable decision-making.Teachers’ decisions can be divided into planning decisions, interactive decisions and evaluative decisions. Interactive decisions refer to decisions made in the classroom. They are on-the-spot decisions and characterized by immediateness. At this stage, teachers make instant decisions without enough time for consideration.Since1990s, in language teaching and research field, scholars abroad have began to study teacher decision-making, especially teachers’ interactive decision-making. However, most of the studies were carried out in the context of English as the second language. Domestically, there are limited studies on teacher decision-making under the context of English as the foreign language, let alone studies on junior middle school English teachers’ interactive decision-making.Based on the literature review of studies both abroad and at home, this thesis attempts to explore junior middle school English teachers’ interactive decision-making. The research addresses the following three questions:(1) What is the current situation of English teachers’ interactive decision-making?(2) What are the factors that may affect teachers’ interactive decision-making?(3) How can teachers improve their interactive decision-making?Questionnaires, classroom observations and after-class interviews were employed in this research to collect both quantitative and qualitative data.30English teachers from4junior middle schools in the city of Wuhan were investigated in the research. Five teachers’ classes were observed and after-class interviews with the five teachers were carried out.The main findings of the research include:(1) On questioning and feedback-giving, teachers were found most concerned about making appropriate adjustments to the questions according to students’ language abilities and least concerned about stimulating students’ reflective thinking by encouraging them to design questions; Teachers usually make interactive decisions when they perceive the problems in teaching and the problems mainly include students’ difficulty in understanding, students’ distraction, and students’ errors; When confronted with unexpected incidents, teachers always try to minimize the negative influences with the help of their previous experience on how to deal with the similar situation; Teachers’ interactive decisions are modifications of their planning decisions and the latter provide a framework and structure for the former.(2) Teachers’ interactive decision-making is affected, explicitly and implicitly, by a variety of factors from students, teachers themselves and other sources. Among them, students’ actual state in the classroom was considered as the main factor.(3) The common suggestions teachers made include strengthening supervision in the group work, timely giving feedbacks to students and encouraging students to participate in the activities and so on.Lastly, the thesis provided some pedagogical implications for middle school English teachers, pointed out the limitations of the present research, and indicated the directions for further future studies.