Junior middle school English teachers are the core participants who play an important role in the process of the new curriculum reform. The new curriculum reform brings both challenges and opportunities for the teachers. Their roles will surely have a great change in the process. In other words, junior middle school English teachers should abandon the old ideas and accept the new ones unceasingly, and this is so-called teacher development.
The implementation of the new curriculum has provided space for professional development of English teachers in junior middle school, but at the same time junior middle school English teachers have great pressures because of the changes and challenges. On one hand, they embrace the new curriculum with enthusiasm in the hope of improving their professional skills and sense of achievement; on the other hand, in response to the overloaded examinations, they regard the new curriculum as an extra burden, from which a sequence of problems and contradictions have arisen.
Due to the situation mentioned above, the researcher studies teacher’s teaching quality and teacher professional development in the context of new curriculum. The aim of the study is to investigate the current state of teaching quality for English teachers in junior middle school, in order to find out existing problems of junior middle school English teaching, to try to explore English teacher development and to offer some suggestions for junior middle school English teachers.
This thesis has both the theory value and practical significance for English teaching in junior middle school. First, the thesis is in favor of enhancing the understanding of junior middle school English teachers’ teaching quality and teacher professional development, which provides the theoretical bases for teachers’ teaching quality and their professional development. Second, it is helpful to provide methods and strategies which promote English teachers’ professional development for the educator.
The thesis consists of five parts, which go as follows:
Part one is a brief introduction of the significance of my study.
Part two is the literature review: one section provides the study at home and abroad, and the other section is the theoretical bases.
Part three is mythology. It includes research subjects and methods.
Part four is findings and proposals: one section cares about research findings on teaching quality of English teachers in junior middle school and the other section puts forward some suggestions for teachers’ professional development.
Part five is the conclusion, including three aspects: the implication of the research, the limitation of the study and suggestions for further research.
II. Literature Review
This part contains a review of the literature relevant to the study. First, historical survey of second language teacher education and development is reviewed; Second, the theoretical bases for teaching quality and professional development of English teachers are given.
2.1 Historical Survey of Second Language Teacher Education
In many senses, English teacher education is not a unified field over the world. According to Freeman (1982:27), language teacher education has become increasingly fragmented and unfocused. Specially speaking, the study on English teacher education abroad has the following characteristics: 初中英语教师教学素质的现状调查及对教师发展的探索(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_14063.html