A Research on the Improvement of Business English Teachers’ Competence in an Internet Plus Era

In an Internet Plus era, the internet technology has brought an unprecedented change to people’s ways and habits of learning, so the traditional BE instructional design cannot meet the talent needs of international business practice. BE teachers’ lack of business knowledge and practical experience forms an obstacle to BE teaching. BE teachers in transition should make more efforts to improve their competence and teaching quality, so as to cultivate comprehensive and practical talents of high quality. This paper aims at discussing how to improve BE teachers’ competence in an Internet Plus era.

Teachers in Transition. A Biographical Perspective on Transnational Professionalisation of Internationally Educated Teachers in Germany

Teachers trained in one country are often not allowed to serve as teachers in another country because their teacher’s license is not recognised as equivalent. The barriers these teachers have to overcome in order to work in their profession again are high and often require further (full) teacher training at the university. The paper provides insights into the conditions for teachers who participate in (re-)qualification programmes in Germany and Europe. By linking the theoretical concepts of a biographical approach to teacher professionalisation and transnationalisation in education, the results of an interview study with teachers who have participated in a programme for refugee teachers at a university in Germany are presented. The Grounded Theory analysis reconstructs the strategies of internationally educated teachers managing to keep up their hope to be able to work as teachers again and thus counter the formal de-professionalisation they are facing.

Philosophies, Traditional Pedagogy, and New Technologies

This chapter reports on a study of teachers in transition, developing their practice and their cognitions regarding the integration of learning technologies with traditional approaches to the teaching of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Taking a case study approach, it examines developments in the practice of three teachers during and after a teacher education programme on the use of technology in the EAP classroom. This is a study of cognition, teaching philosophy, and the relationship between pedagogy, technology, and content, and how teachers situate these within their own practice. The setting is the rapidly changing UK higher education environment, where the speed of change is such that today's latest fashions and gadgets may well be yesterday's news tomorrow. Thus, this is not a tale of individual technologies or tools to make teachers' lives better. This is a story of people, of pedagogy's traditional values intersecting with technology, and the issues arising from this, alongside the evolution of strategies for dealing with these issues.

Teachers in Transition

This chapter explores the development of the identity of English teachers who have moved from General English teaching into the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Many general TEFL teachers move into EAP as their teaching careers develop; however, contemporary TEFL initiation training courses, such as the CELTA, do not as a matter of course provide any sort of grounding for the shift in linguistic knowledge and classroom management skills required to successfully adapt to the requirements of the EAP classroom and its students. Since such initiation training courses often leave an indelible mark on the teaching styles of most practitioners (Alwright & Hanks, 2009), even teachers who go on to become fully TEFL qualified via a DELTA or Master's route may find the new demands of the EAP environment sometimes leave them reliant upon TEFL-orientated classroom protocols, only to find such approaches wholly inappropriate or ineffective on a skills-based syllabus.