The Impact Of Early Field Experience On Pre-service English Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge Development:a Survey Study

National English Curriculum (NEC) in the stage of compulsory education proposes explicitly that middle school English teachers improve their professional level from three aspects:updating subject matter knowledge, accumulating pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and developing the ability of reflection. Integrating PCK framework with National English Curriculum, the research poses that there are five PCK components required by NEC for middle school English teachers:knowledge of English teaching strategies, knowledge of English teaching resources, knowledge of students’ learning situation, knowledge of assessment of students’ learning and overarching conceptions of NEC.Taking the five PCK components as the theoretical framework, the thesis investigates the impact of early field experience on pre-service English teachers’PCK by addressing the following questions:1) Did early field experience exert impact on the five PCK components of pre-service English teachers? 2) If yes, what PCK components are better developed than others? And what tasks are more effective to develop PCK of pre-service English teachers?Having designed a questionnaire and made quantitative analyses of the questionnaire data by SPSS 20.0 software, the research comes to three major findings: Firstly, early field experience has exerted impacts on pre-service English teachers’ understanding of overarching conceptions of National English Curriculum and knowledge of English teaching strategies, English teaching resources and assessment of students’ learning while it has almost not exerted impact on their knowledge of students’learning situation. Secondly, among the three stages of early field experience, the fieldwork stage and the summary stage have much more impact than the preparation stage on pre-service English teachers’PCK. Thirdly, tasks of observing mentors’ lessons and observing other mentors’ lessons in the fieldwork stage and the tasks of writing lesson design, writing lesson observation form and writing good teaching fragments contribute a lot to pre-service English teachers’PCK while attending reflective reports at night and observing lessons in other middle schools in the fieldwork stage contribute less. Tasks of attending the launch meeting, contacting the university supervisors and contacting middle school mentors almost have no impact on pre-service English teachers’PCK.Based on the research results, the research puts forward the following suggestions:First, tasks which aim at promoting pre-service English teachers’ development of knowledge of students’ learning situation and knowledge of assessment of students’learning should be designed in early field experience. Second, the preparation stage should be strengthened with more "warming-up" tasks; Third, more effects should be made to innovate the practice way of tasks in Early field experience with more discussion-based, participatory and inquiry tasks from which pre-service English teachers can construct instead of acquiring pedagogical content knowledge.