A Study On Needs Of English Teachers’ Professional Development In Primary Schools

Since the1990s, English teachers’ professional development has become a hottopic in the field of second language acquisition. It has been recognized that teachers’quality is one of the main factors of teaching and learning quality. The UNESCO(United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) has put forwardfive key factors that influence teaching quality and then made a formula for teachingquality. The formula demonstrates that the higher the teacher’s quality is, the better theteaching quality is. Among the five factors, teacher’s quality is the most crucial one toteaching quality.This study intends to investigate the needs of English teachers’ professionaldevelopment in primary schools in Nancheng District, Dongguan City, GuangdongProvince. The participants of this study are129primary school English teachers (116female teachers and13male ones) from14schools. It attempts to explore:(1) thecurrent situation of subject English teachers’ professional development;(2) needs thatthe subject English teachers demand for professional development;(3) difficultiesthey meet in pursuing professional development. Both questionnaire and interviewwere employed as quantitative and qualitative approaches in this study. The SPSS17.0was employed for the statistical analysis. In qualitative study, four teachers frompublic schools and another four from private ones were selected as interviewees.The study has revealed several main findings. First, of the129subject teachers,122are in the initial and on-going stage of pursuing professional development.Second, of the needs concerning the six dimensions of professional development, allthe dimensions are above3.5in a5-point Likert scale questionnaire, which suggeststhat the teachers have strong desire of pursuing professional development. Among thesix dimensions in general, the needs for language knowledge and skills rank the first.For particular needs on each dimensions, what the subject teacher need most are speaking skills, psychology knowledge on foreign language teaching and so on.Thirdly, subject teachers have difficulties when pursuing professional development.The biggest two difficulties are heavy working burden and lacking of administrativepolicy support.Based on the findings of the study, some suggestions are proposed. Firstly, thegovernment should arrange suitable teachers to the schools, be an active organizer ofteacher’ professional development and distribute more money to education cause.Secondly, schools should take their responsibilities to relieve the work burden ofprimary school English teachers, form a proper system on assessing teachers’performance, provide certain funds for teachers’ professional development andpropose school-based teaching and research. Finally, teachers need to improveself-awareness to pursue professional development and diversify ways to accelerateprofessional development.