A Case Study On Teaching Performance Assessment Of The English M.Ed.student Teachers

In March 2009,the Ministry of Education issued “Guidelines for the Cultivation of Full Time Professional Masters Degree Students”,clarifying that the training goal of full-time Masters of Education is to “cultivate high-quality primary and secondary school teachers with modern educational theories and the abilities to teach and research.” The English M.Ed.students are the successors of English education in future,and their teaching ability plays an crucial role in the quality of English education in China.Therefore,how to scientifically assess their ability to provide students with high-quality teaching has become one of the biggest challenges in Chinese education.Due to the implicitness and complexity,teaching ability is hard to be directly observed and assessed.Therefore,scholars at home and abroad change their perspectives and assess the teaching performance regarded as explicit teaching ability.The teaching performance truly and objectively reflects the teaching ability of teachers,which provides a new perspective for the research on teaching ability.This research aims to address two questions: First,how do two English M.Ed.student teachers perform in the process of teaching? Second,what are the factors influencing their teaching performance?In this research,two English M.Ed.student teachers in high school are used as cases,and edTPA,the teacher performance assessment of student teachers in the United States,is used as an assessment tool to evaluate the teaching performance of student teachers around the three tasks of Planning,Instruction and Assessment.Class observation,interviews and other methods are used to collect the data.Based on the results of the case analysis,this research draws the following conclusions: according to the descriptors in the five-level rubrics of edTPA,the two English M.Ed.student teachers perform well in the process of teaching and are qualified to be teachers;two student teachers both perform best in Planning,followed by Instruction,and perform worst in Assessment.Through interviews,the results show that learning experience,teaching practice and the advisor of student teachers are the main factors influencing their teaching performance.Finally,the research puts forward reasonable suggestions for improving the teaching ability of English M.Ed.Students,and implications for universities to train English M.Ed.students.