High School English Teacher’s Core Competencies in China: A Case Study of the Teacher Qualification Examination Syllabus

Abstract

English is becoming increasingly important in subjects during the internationalization progress. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the National English Curriculum for Nine-year Compulsory Education in China has been developing with the progress of the times and the improvement of national policies. Meanwhile, teachers' teaching ability is closely related to students' learning achievement and future development. Under this circumstance, English teachers' teaching ability and subject knowledge have attracted much attention in China. Through quantitative analysis, the main findings of this paper are as following: 1) Teaching with higher quality will lead to students’ positive and sustainable development in the future, for the quality of teachers’ teaching performance can literally play a decisive role in students’ achievement; the most important factor that affects education and predicts students’ achievement is the quality of teachers’ teaching in class; 2) After it is analyzed, the core competence of senior high school English teachers in China through quantitative proportion analysis and word frequency analysis of the core contents of the syllabus is discovered. Through quantitative analysis, it is found that the emphasis of teacher assessment in the senior high school English teacher qualification examination includes both general pedagogical knowledge and English pedagogical knowledge and competence. Therefore, this paper suggests that teachers should not only have professional English pedagogical skills, but also have strong teaching-related skills (e.g., classroom management); 3) The professional motivation which is reflected in the emotional motivation characteristics of candidates doesn't seem to be fairly reflected in the exam. The results of this study have certain instructional significance for the design, implementation, reliability, and validity of the English teacher qualification examination for senior high schools in China.