| In the past decades, the linguists’research for the practitioner of Foreign Language Teaching---eachers become deeper and more specific, and the research on teachers’cognition has become a new paradigm. Reflection, as is considered a distinctive aspect of teacher cognitive development, has been widely studied in the educational field both abroad and at home recent years.Numerous research studies have consistently yielded that reflection is an important means of improving teaching practice and fostering teacher professional development; however, due to the widespread adoption of the general model of reflective teaching, most of the studies emphasized reflection in classroom context. Knowledge is distributed everywhere in our life world, experienced teachers who are good at learning would reflect from the different aspects of life, drawing wisdom for their professional development. So the teachers’reflective learning study should be extended to the whole process of teachers’ work, learning, and life. It should be rooted in the social, situated and cultural soil in which each teacher survives and develops.L. S. Vygotsky, the Russian psychologist, the founder the cultural historical psychology (psychological foundation of Sociocultural Theory), gives an explanation of the cognitive development theory in a new unique angle. According to this theory, high mental functioning is not only the personal-driven experience and individual cognitive process, it is embodied in social interaction, mainly derives from an external-internal process, that is, first from the social plane and then individual’s psychological plane. The social environment and interaction with others not only provides context for teachers to reflect on, but also is the inexhaustible source of the cognitive development; in the interaction with others and environment, thought and thinking ability get emerged and promoted through the mediation of "reflective writing". Therefore, the present study tries to apply Vygotsky’s cognitive development theory into the study of teacher’s life reflection, exploring the emergence and characteristics of teacher’s thinking represented in life reflective journal.The present study is a case study of an English teacher in a University in Shandong, who is a typical case of obtaining satisfactory professional development with self-study. The author adopts the Grounded Theory method when treating with the teacher’s life reflective journal, to answer the following three research questions:(1) What are the sources of the reflection?(2) Whether there appears some spontaneous emergence related to teacher development from the reflection, if yes, what?(3) What are the features of thinking mode reflected in the reflection? The findings indicated that the content of the teacher’s life reflection include classroom teaching, reading, family events, societal issues, academic activities and work. In the reflective process, the teacher get the emergent insights in such areas as thinking, learning, educating, and scientific research which are related with professional development; the main feature of thinking mode shown in her reflection is thinking transference, which are specifically displayed as transference between research projects, between fields, between theories and practices, and then, to a higher level, between phenomenon and essence.The results confirmed the validity of using Vygotsky’s cognitive development theory in analyzing teacher’s cognitive development in everyday life. Both the direct experience and indirect learning are important cognitive approaches. Compared with the traditional research on teacher cognition, the adoption of teacher’s life reflective journal can attach more comprehensive attention to teacher’s abundant learning and growth course as a whole person, and explore the cognitive source derived from life world, which is of great importance for teacher’s professional development. |
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