This is the first part of the thesis. And there are three subparts in all. They areresearch background, research objectives and significance and thesis layout.
1.1 Research background
A large number of studies in the fields of general education and pedagogy have usedmetaphors analysis as a research tool. For the most part, these studies focused on theteachers and students' attitudes to the teaching and teachers in classrooms (BuUough,1991). These studies aim at helping teachers to articulate and construct representations ofthemselves and their experience (Kramsch, 2017) and to promote awareness ofprofessional practice (Cortazzi & Jin, 1999). And many studies prove that importance ofuncovering metaphors about language teaching and learning where metaphors have beenused to examine the particularities of the language teaching profession and to describeteacher-student interaction (Cameron & Low, 1999; Oxford, 1998). But all these havefocused on the general language teaching and seldom pay attention to the particularitiesof English teaching and the differences between pre-service and in-service teachers'teaching metaphors.Educators in China also have done plenty of researches on teachers' teachingmetaphors (Zhang, 2017; Gaowei, 2017; Yanshi, 2017). They mainly pay attention to thefunctions of metaphors, including the relation between the abilities to use metaphors andforeign language teaching, analysis of teachers' metaphors and its application in languagelearning and teaching. Few of them have specialized on the English teaching in middleschools.
1.2 Research objectives and significance
This study is mainly going to examine the following questions: (1) whether there isany difference in the metaphors and teaching beliefs between pre-service teacher andin-service teacher and why they are similar or different from each other. (2) whetherteaching beliefs behind the same or similar metaphors are the same and why they aresimilar or different from each other. And the main research objectives are as the follow:(1) to verify a hypothesis that there are bright differences in metaphors produced bypre-service and in-service teachers. (2) to analyze what kind of teaching beliefs arehidden in these metaphors. (3) to explore the teaching beliefs of those teachers whogenerate the same or similar metaphors by conducting an interview with them.Through the analysis in this article, the English teachers in middle school can maketheir implicit teaching beliefs explicit and they can reflect on their daily teaching andmake improvement. As it is a study conducted among the students of Central ChinaNormal University, it may be helpful for professors to better design the curriculum formasters of English education. Theoretically, this study can be a supplement of theresearches on using metaphors to explore pre-service and in-service teachers' teachingbeliefs. By analyzing the same metaphors, we can see that it is insufficient to use onlymetaphor analysis to explore teachers' teaching beliefs. A follow-up interview or someother ways should be used as an assistant tool to explore the teaching beliefscomprehensively.1.3 Thesis layoutThere are six parts in all. The first part is an introduction to the whole thesis, whichmainly introduces the background of this study and the aims and significance of it. Parttwo is a literature review，英语毕业论文，英语论文题目 |
