Professional Development of Secondary EFL Teachers: Lessons from China

By Guangwei Hu. Teachers College Record, 2005

91 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since China initiated its modernization program in the late 1970s, professional development of secondary teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) has been given much prominence because of the perceived important role that English can play in the modernization drive. This article provides a critical overview of secondary EFL teacher education in China with the intent of offering useful lessons to foreign language teacher education in other parts of the world. The critique is made within a framework that draws on theoretical and empirical research on teacher education in four areas: (a) the knowledge base for teaching, (b) pedagogical effectiveness in fostering knowledge acquisition and intellectual qualities that support continuing professional development, (c) professional development in the community of practice, and (d) the coherence of professional development work. Through the analytical lenses provided by the framework, the article scrutinizes two curriculums for secondary EFL teacher preparation programs and the instructional practices prevalent in these programs. It also examines secondary EFL teachers’ continuing professional development in the workplace and through formally organized in-service programs. Based on the critical examination, suggestions are made for addressing identified problems and improving the effectiveness and relevance of the EFL teacher education system.

Subfields: Language and Linguistics, Literature and Literary Theory

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/98e92f8a4189ba203983226c9077969bb0834ab6

How researchers see this paper

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In Language and Linguistics

1. Tony Wright
2. Heng Hou
3. Paul Thompson
4. Ken Hyland

In Literature and Literary Theory

1. Tony Wright
2. Heng Hou
3. Paul Thompson
4. Ken Hyland

Citations in the corpus

• Second language teacher education: Review of recent research on practice (2010, background): “Many programmes in contexts such as China are prompted to reform by contact with the Anglo-Saxon tradition explored in this article.”
• What makes an online community of practice work? A situated study of Chinese student teachers’ perceptions of online professional learning (2015, background): “Over the last decade, Chinese Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have been given support to set up preservice teacher education programmes (MOE, 2006; State Council, 2001) in order to ‘ameliorate the problems of quantity and quality with the teaching force’ (Hu, 2005, p. 667).”