A Contrastive Study On Teachers’ And Students’ Perspective Differences In Senior High School English Teachers’ Professional Qualities

As we know, teachers’ knowledge and understanding of their professionalqualities are generally based on books as well as their own experience. This is also thecase with many relevant studies which focus on teachers’ perspectives. However,teachers’ professional qualities are closely related with teaching and are directlyexperienced by the learners themselves. Yet, quite frequently, teachers’ perspectiveson their professional qualities are usually different from students’ and studies on thisaspect are not adequate.This study applies questionnaire and interview to make a contrastive study ofteachers’ and students’ perspective differences in the importance of some componentsof senior high school English teachers’ professional qualities. It answers two researchquestions:1) what are the perspective differences between teachers and students insenior high school English teachers professional qualities?2) what are the students’justifications for their perspectives significantly different from teachers’?12senior high schools were selected from3different cities in GuangdongProvince: Guangzhou, Maoming and Qingyuan, with4schools selected from eachcity. In each school,20teachers and20students were selected respectively,contributing to the total number of240teachers and240students as research subjects.The design of the questionnaire is subjected to three such design principles asUnderstandability, Perceptibility and “Gap” on the basis of pilot studies, and theapplication of Likert Scale. The60items in the questionnaire aim to find out teachers’and students’ perspective differences through the analysis of their respectiveperspectives on the importance of each component of teachers’ professional qualities.Afterwards, in-depth interviews were carried out to detect students’ justifications fortheir perspective differences through10interview questions that were made accordingto10items with top major gaps found in the contrastive analysis of questionnaires.The research findings in questionnaire survey show us that among the60items,there are10items with D-values equal to or above1.5,13items with Difference-values ranging1.4~1.0and37items with Difference-values below1.0.The findings of the10items with top major gaps are as follows. For one thing,students consider it quite important that teachers remember all their names, finishclasses on time, speak English fluently and accurately, treat students equally and givestudents positive comments, while teachers fail to attach same importance to them.For another, teachers regard it quite important that they treat students strictly, givestudents instant error-correction feedback, be insistent of principles, have systematiccomprehensive English grammar knowledge and communicate with students’ parentsconstantly, whereas, students hold completely different ideas. In addition, interviewsurvey findings demonstrate students’ favor of teachers’ oral English competence,humanistic concerns as well as their expectation of teachers teaching them with suchaffections as respects, recognition and equality, etc. Meanwhile, students attachimportance to the interestingness, and practicability of teaching contents and methods.Based on teachers’ and students’ perspective differences, this study highlightsproblems turning up in the process of educating and teaching. It provides somereferences to teachers coping with their relationship with students, teaching contentsand approaches, as well as teachers’ professional quality development.