摘要
Initial teacher preparation and teachers’ continuing professional development are two significant pillars of the teacher education enterprise. The former encompasses a wide range of teachereducation initiatives at the levels of diploma, bachelor’s degree, postgraduate diploma, and even master’s degree for teacher licensure purposes. These are widely documented in the literature.What is important is how teacher professional development contributes to bolstering the teachereducator force, which is relatively insufficiently documented due to the very fact that different educational systems have somewhat different expectations of such programs in relation to the ideologies and theories underpinning the teacher professional development program design and curriculum offering. Taking stock of a postgraduate diploma program in English language teaching(PGDELT) for teachers’ continuing professional development with a 31-year history housed at a premier teacher education institution in Singapore, which has successfully graduated over 1, 000 English language teachers for colleges and universities in China, I intend to highlight some of its key features, as a former student and then a lecturer on the program, in order to draw implications for sustainable growth of language teacher education programs, especially those whose main purposes are to prepare teachers of English as a second or foreign language(ESL/EFL) and provide continuing professional development opportunities for such inservice teachers.
岗前教师培训和教师专业发展是教师教育事业的两个重要支柱。前者包括文凭、学士学位、研究生文凭,甚至包括硕士学位在内的各种教师教育项目,目的是为了获得教师资格证书。这些在文献中被广泛记录。后者关注教师的专业发展是如何为增强教师教育队伍做出贡献。由于不同的教育体系对基于教师专业发展的意识形态和理论方案的期望有所不同,因此课程设计和课程开设的文献记载相对不足。新加坡国立教育学院为中国高校教师开设的教师专业发展研究生文凭项目已有31年历史,已成功培养了1,000多位中国高等学校的英语教师。我本人为该项目的毕业生,并且曾任教该项目十余年,深感有责任与义务对该项目重新审视、总结其主要特征,以期对在岗外语教师教育,尤其是英语作为第二语言或外语的教师教育项目的可持续发展,提供借鉴意义。