Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
The country’s everlasting future lies in Education, while education depends on teachers. Education is the cornerstone of the nation’s development, and teachers are founders of education. In 2017, National Medium- and Long-Term Plan for Education Reform and Development was enacted and implemented, claiming the necessity of constructing high-quality teaching staff. Qualified teachers are the prerequisite of qualified education. Therefore, more expectations are given to our teachers in the present background of curriculum reform. Teachers are the vital factors that impact on success or failure of the reform. The improvement of teachers’ professionalism is becoming the focus in this reform, for the components and structure of teachers’ professionalism directly influences teachers’ understanding towards the reform. Teacher knowledge, as one of the most important parts of teacher professionalism, has become the focus of teacher research along with the release of Handbook of Research on Teaching (Wittrock, 1986), for teacher knowledge and teacher belief determine teachers’ decisions on how to behave in real classroom practices. In the past years, much attention has been drawn on subject matter knowledge and general pedagogical knowledge. However, teachers not only need to possess the above two kinds of knowledge, but more importantly, need a good commend of subject-specific pedagogical knowledge which is highly connected to practical experience. This is what the American educationalist L.S. Shuman called “pedagogical content knowledge” (hereafter shortened as PCK). Shulman (1986) pointed out that the development of PCK was the key to help novice teachers grow into expert teachers. Novice teachers, through a process of “pedagogical reasoning”(Shulman, 1987), which include comprehension, transformation, instruction, evaluation, reflection and new comprehension, could transform their content knowledge into pedagogical content knowledge. The concept of PCK has made up the phenomenon of “two pieces of skin” between disciplinary content knowledge and general pedagogical knowledge.
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1.2 Research Objectives
Ever since the implement of reform in basic education, the development of elementary and secondary English teachers’ PCK has drawn a large amount of attention in the area of foreign language teaching (Han Gang, 2017). In the past three decades, many research on foreign\ second language teacher’s PCK have been carried o，英语论文，英语毕业论文 |
