A Case Study Of The Factors Affecting English Teachers’ Development Of Elective Courses In High Schools

In recent years, the development of elective courses in senior high schools has been an important point of New Curriculum Reform in China. Successful curriculum reform requires active involvement of teachers. Therefore, the curriculum reform gave teachers the right to develop elective courses. But most teachers participated in curriculum as the subject of curriculum development for the first time. Many problems occurred in their practice of developing elective courses. This thesis aims to explore the current situation of teachers’development of elective courses and its influential factors. To be more specific, this paper attempts to ask (1) What elective courses have high school English teachers developed?(2) What are the factors affecting English Teachers’development of elective courses?This study involves case study of two high school English teachers named Ye Xia and Yu Hui. They were the participants of a teacher training program called "The settings and implementation of English elective courses in senior high schools". This teacher training program was undertook by Zhejiang Normal University from July20th to August1st,2013. Among all the participant teachers, Ye Xia and Yu Hui performed well in reporting their own experience of developing elective courses. Their story and experience were so typical that worth our deep researching. The research methods adopted in the study were case study, interview and observation, etc. The data was collected from a period of about6months, including two round of individual interviews, class records, Ye Xia and Yu Hui’s curriculum plans, their teaching plans, the feedback of the English Talent Show from the website of Yingzhou middle school and so on.This study defines curriculum development as a comprehensive and never-ending process which includes determining curriculum objectives, selecting and organizing teaching content, implementing curriculum, and evaluating curriculum. Accordingly, in the first place,4elective courses developed by Ye Xia and Yu Hui are described mainly from the aspects of curriculum objectives, teaching contents, curriculum implementation and curriculum evaluation. It is found that all the elective courses belong to the knowledge related course. Specifically, all of them fall into the category of application-oriented elective course. In addition, those four elective courses are all developed by the teachers on their own. To some extent, it indicates that there exist some problems in high school English teachers’ development of elective courses:(1) the elective courses developed by high school English teachers are not various enough.(2) the elective courses are developed in a simple and single way. In the second place, the current study analyzes the existing factors from two dimensionalities:the internal factors and the external factors. For the internal factors, this study focuses on the following five factors:teachers’ awareness and conception of developing elective courses, teachers’ capability of collecting information, teachers’ capability of curriculum planning, selection, implementation and evaluation, teachers’ capability of reflecting and doing research, and teachers’ capability of cooperating with others. While, for the external factors, this study analyzes the influence of teachers’ culture, the support from school leaders, the participation of students and parents, the influence of evaluation system and the influence of curriculum specialist. Finally, the paper puts forward some suggestions for teachers, schools and the education administrative department.This study ventures to guide the participants and other teachers to have a careful reconsideration of their practice of developing elective courses. At the same time, it provides reference and suggestions to promote English teachers’ future development of elective courses in high schools.