CHUNMEI LI (CHINA ASSOCIATION OF HIGHER EDUCAITON)

BUILDING A PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITY ON ACTION RESEARCH FOR COLLEGE ENGLISH TEACHERS: PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS : TEACHER EDUCATION AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Professional learning community (PLC) is an effective way to enhance teacher professional development. The researcher has built a school-based PLC of college teachers for English majors, including one organizer, 3 professors as tutors and 8 teacher members. The PLC aims to promote teachers’ competence in English teaching, doing research esp. action research (AR), reflecting and cooperating, and artificial intelligence empowerment. The study is a 2-year action research on building PLC. In the monthly PLC activities, through sharing and discussing teaching video clips, teaching plans, puzzles in implementing the plans, in assessing the action effect, in writing action research papers, and reflections, the whole PLC has made a huge progress. Nevertheless, due to large varieties of members, high teacher mobility and lack of AR knowledge and motivation, time arrangement, reflection journal quality and quantity, effectiveness of the activities and the quality of research products are the main problems of the present PLC development. The researcher collected and analyzed the data from deep interviews with 3 members and 1 tutor, all records of the activities and reflection journals. The possible solutions for the new round are setting new organizing systems such as semi-open membership to guarantee learning effectiveness, to establish research assistants to facilitate members, to enrich the activities topics and forms with new technology, etc.

Dr. Li Chunmei received her Ph.D. from Beijing Foreign Studies University and is an Associate Professor at South China Business College Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, teaching Integrated English for English majors. Her research interests include foreign language teacher development and second language acquisition.