2. Professional Quality/Competence of English Teachers and its Growth/Development
英语教师的专业素养及其形成与发展
一、 What makes a good language teacher? 优秀或合格英语教师的标准维度有哪些？
Phenomenon
Some people with an excellent command of a foreign language may not be able to teach the language well while others with a general command of the language can teach it very effectively. What do you think might account for this?
Work in groups. Reflect on your own learning experiences from early school years to the university. Have you had an excellent English teacher? Try to identify as many qualities as possible of your best English teacher(s). Note down all the qualities that you think are important for a good English teacher.
It is clear that whether someone can become a good foreign language teacher does not solely depend on his/her command of the language. There are a variety of elements that contribute to the qualities of a good language teacher. These elements can be categorized into three groups: ethic devotion, professional qualities and personal styles (Parrot, 1993， cited in Wang Qiang, 2006:7).
Ethic devotion, professional qualities and personal styles jointly contribute to the making of a good English teacher.
Task
All the adjectives in the box below could be used to characterize these three aspects.
1. Work in groups of 4 and decide which adjectives describe ethic devotion, which describe personal styles and which describe professional qualities. Please write your answers on a separate piece of paper.
2. Add any adjectives to the list which describe further qualities that you feel are missing.
3. These adjectives are intended to describe positive qualities or styles. Do you feel that any of them could have a negative side as well? If yes, in what way? For example, an authoritative teacher may make the students feel assured, but may also make the student less free to disagree with him/her.
From the above activities we can see that a good English teacher should have ethic devotion, certain desirable personal styles, and more importantly, he or she should have necessary professional qualities. These three aspects constitute the professional competence of a good English teacher.
A person who has a good command of English is not necessarily a good teacher because he has only one of the elements of professional competence.
It is assumed that all responsible English teachers have ethic devotion, and they are supposed to make their personal styles compatible with their work.
英语教师的基本素质
（田式国，英语教学理论与实践 北京：高等教育出版社， 2001：215）
◆ What makes a good teacher? --- Qualities of good teachers
Common sense and studies show that the quality of teachers is one of the most critical components of students' achievement. In most cases we even dare to say that teachers are the single biggest influence on how well students learn. So it's no surprise the discussion about enhancing and reforming education always zero in on the quality of teaching in the classroom.
In many countries, teacher training has become an established network in the field of education. Take U.S. as a cornerstone of education reform, the historic No Child Left Behind Act that President Bush signed into law in January 2002, requires that by the end of the 2005-2006 school year there be a highly qualified teacher in every classroom.
Palmer (1999:27)
Good teaching isn't about technique. I've asked students around the country to describe their good teachers to me. Some of them describe people who lecture all the time, some of them describe people who do little other than facilitate group process, and others describe everything in between. But all of them describe people who have some sort of connective capacity, who connect themselves to their students, their students to each other, and everyone to the subject being studied.
Hassett (2000) believes that good teachers
have a sense of purpose;
have expectations of success for all students;
tolerate ambiguity;
demonstrate a willingness to adapt and change to meet student needs;
are comfortable with not knowing;
reflect on their work;
learn from a variety of models;
enjoy their work and their students.
Hu (2005) studies four dimensions for developing qualities of English teachers in Chinese secondary schools:
(a) the knowledge base for teaching;
(b) pedagogical effectiveness in fostering knowledge acquisition and intellectual qualifies that support continuing professional development;
(c) professional development in the community of practice;
(d) the coherence of professional development work.
(Hu, Guangwei. (2005). Professional Development of Secondary EFL Teachers: Lessons
From China. Retrieved online 3 Apr. 2006 at http://www, blackwell-synergy, com/.)
From his personal experience and observation, Beidler (1997) offers 10 suggestions on good teachers:
1) Good teachers really want to be good teachers.
2) Good teachers take risks.
3) Good teachers have a positive attitude.
4) Good teachers never have enough time: they are busy with their work.
5) Good teachers think of teaching as a form of parenting.
6) Good teachers try to give their students confidence.
7) Good teachers try to keep students--and themselves—off balance.
8) Good teachers try to motivate students by working within their incentive system.
9) Good teachers do not trust student evaluations.
Good teachers do tend to get very good evaluations, but they focus on the one or two erratic evaluations that say something negative about them. They ask themselves what they did wrong for those one or two students.
10) Good teachers listen to their students.
Good teaching
Brain (1998) summarizes four "core qualities" that make good teaching.
Knowledge
Sound field knowledge and broad knowledge system are what students consistently and clearly target as the number one quality of good teaching. You must be an expert in your field if you are going to be a good teacher. This is a prerequisite.
Communication
The second core quality that makes good teaching is the ability to communicate their knowledge and expertise to students.
It is a common misconception that knowledge of a subject is all that's required to be a good teacher; that the students should be willing and able to extract the meat from what you say regardless of how it is delivered.
Good teaching helps make a subject crystal clear to the students. A bad one makes it impenetrable, confusing and disorganized. Good teaching bespeaks the effort needed to find innovative and creative ways to make complicated ideas understandable to their students, and to fit new ideas into the context available to the student. There is a saying, "Give me a fish and I eat for a day; teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime." This is the philosophy of good teaching.
Interest
Good teaching makes the material relevant to learners and maintains their interest. Good teaching shows students how the material will apply to their lives and their careers. Good teaching makes students want to learn the material by making it interesting.
Respect A good teacher always possesses these three core qualities: knowledge, the ability to convey to students an understanding of that knowledge, and the ability to make the material interesting and relevant to students. Complementing these three is a fourth quality:
good teaching consists of a deep-seated concern and respect from the teacher for the students in the classroom
二、 How can one become a good language teacher? 英语教师成长与发展模式
A question that many teachers often ask is: I like my job, and I love the students, but how can I become a good English teacher? Our answer is that they need professional competence.
The most important and most difficult part of the making of a good language teacher is the development of professional competence, which is the state or quality of being adequately qualified for the profession, and armed with a specific range of skills, strategies, knowledge, and ability.
A language teacher's professional competence is much more difficult than a driver' s skill to handle a car, and is more complicated than a student's competence of speaking a foreign language. It involves more factors and longer learning time, and may never be finished. Some people think teaching is a craft; that is, a novice teacher can learn the profession by imitating the experts' techniques, just like an apprentice. Others hold the view that teaching is an applied science, based on scientific knowledge and experimentation. By making a compromise between these two views, Wallace (1991) uses a 'reflective model' to demonstrate the development of professional competence. The following model is an adapted version to illustrate the process of becoming a professionally competent teacher.
From the above model, we can see the development of professional competence for a language teacher involves Stage 1, Stage 2, and Goal. The first stage is language development. All English teachers are supposed to have a sound command of English. As language is the subject matter for language teachers and also because language is always changing, language development can never come to an end. The second stage is the most crucial stage and it is more complicated because it involves three sub-stages: learning, practice, and reflection. The learning stage is actually the purposeful preparation that a language teacher normally receives before he/she starts the practice of teaching. This preparation can include:
1. learning from others' experiences (empirical knowledge gained through reading and observations)
2. learning the received knowledge (language learning theories, educational psychology, language teaching methodology, etc.)
3. learning from one's own experiences as a learner
Both experiential knowledge (others' and one's own) and received knowledge are useful when a teacher goes to practice. This is the combination of 'craft' and 'applied science' knowledge. The learning stage is followed by practice. The term 'practice' can be used in two senses. In one sense, it is a short period of time assigned to do teaching practice as part of one's pre-service education, usually under the supervision of instructors. This practice is also called pseudo practice. The other sense of 'practice' is the real classroom teaching that a teacher undertakes after he/she finishes formal education.
Teachers benefit from practice if they keep on reflecting on what they have been doing (Stanely, 1999). It should be noted that teachers reflect on their work not only after they finish a certain period of practice, but also while they are doing the practice.
When the would-be teachers (trainees) are doing pseudo practice, they are often trying out ideas that they have learned in a methodology class. Therefore, they are likely to reflect on how well a certain idea or technique works and often their instructors may require them to do so. The pseudo practice is beneficial only if the student teachers take reflections seriously. The most difficult thing is to keep on reflecting on one's work when one moves on to real classroom teaching.
Ideally, a teacher should be able to attain his/her professional competence after some period of practice and reflection as shown in Figure 1.1. However, professional competence as an ultimate goal does not seem to have an end. With the ever-deepening of our understanding of teaching and learning, and with the ever changing needs of the society, of education, of students, and of the teaching requirements, one must keep on learning, practicing and reflecting. Actually professional competence is 'a moving target or horizon, towards which professionals travel all their professional life but which is never finally attained.' (Wallace, 1991:58).
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