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 th...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.展开更多
The importance of teacher talk in EFL （English as a foreign language） class has aroused much attention in China since the late 1990s. On a basis of classroom discourse analysis, this paper has observed 14 courses wi...The importance of teacher talk in EFL （English as a foreign language） class has aroused much attention in China since the late 1990s. On a basis of classroom discourse analysis, this paper has observed 14 courses with 21 hours in total from advanced and fundamental grades in an English department. The classroom observation has been transcribed to analyze the features of teacher talk in various English courses in terms of five dimensions--discourse quantity, questioning types, feedback manners, interactional modification features, and conversation chains, It is found that on average there is significant difference in those five dimensions between fundamental and advanced courses. In terms of discourse quantity, the teacher talk has occupied more than 80% of the total talk amount and the total teacher talk in advanced courses is more than that in fundamental ones; the number of display questions is much more than that of referential questions; evaluative feedbacks are more than discursive ones; all of the teachers prefer to employ confirmation checks to modify students＇ answer, and half of the conversational chains are IRF （Initial-Response-Follow-up） structure while another half are full of complicated chains. The paper then provides some suggestions and implications for EFL teaching in the light of these findings.展开更多
文摘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.
文摘The importance of teacher talk in EFL （English as a foreign language） class has aroused much attention in China since the late 1990s. On a basis of classroom discourse analysis, this paper has observed 14 courses with 21 hours in total from advanced and fundamental grades in an English department. The classroom observation has been transcribed to analyze the features of teacher talk in various English courses in terms of five dimensions--discourse quantity, questioning types, feedback manners, interactional modification features, and conversation chains, It is found that on average there is significant difference in those five dimensions between fundamental and advanced courses. In terms of discourse quantity, the teacher talk has occupied more than 80% of the total talk amount and the total teacher talk in advanced courses is more than that in fundamental ones; the number of display questions is much more than that of referential questions; evaluative feedbacks are more than discursive ones; all of the teachers prefer to employ confirmation checks to modify students＇ answer, and half of the conversational chains are IRF （Initial-Response-Follow-up） structure while another half are full of complicated chains. The paper then provides some suggestions and implications for EFL teaching in the light of these findings.
