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vels of learning accessible to a diverse student body, thedemands to create school learning organizations that recognize and welcome newopportunities to develop students'judgments and abilities to deal with change within theircontext".
In the past, teaching has traditionally been an occupation pursued largely in isolationfrom one's colleagues. Donald Freeman (1998) describes it as an "egg-box profession" inwhich each of us is carefully kept separate from our fellow teachers. A crucial componentof teacher development had been to overcome this isolation with collaborative effortsboth within and beyond the classroom. As Fullan (1991) states, "When teacher do needhelp, the most effective source tend to be fellow teachers, and secondly administratorsand specialists." while it is through support and guidance of teacher learning communityteachers can constantly find problems during their teaching practice and finally solvethem.
 In this way, teacher can become an effective and mature educator step by step(Zhou, 2008).In the context of China's educational reform in high schools, English teachers insenior high school form English Teaching and Research Group (henceforth ETRG),which is also regarded as a kind of the Teacher Learning Community(henceforth TLC) topromote   collaboration   between   colleagues   and   facilitate   teacher professionaldevelopment. So the construction of ETRG is crucial to staff development and also to theentire school.

Chapter Two Theoretical Framework

In searching for a theoretical framework for answering the central question of thisstudy on Chinese EFL(henceforth EFL) Teacher learning community and development,the author found that Vygotsky's social constructivism and Wenger's community ofpractice provide a useful theoretical lens to help understand the complex cognitiveprocess of teacher's knowing, thinking and learning in teacher's social context.

2.1 Vygotsky's social constructivism
Social constructivism is a sociological theory of knowledge that applies the generalphilosophical constructivism into social settings, wherein groups construct knowledge forone another, collaboratively creating a small culture of shared artifacts with sharedmeanings. When one is immersed within a culture of this sort, one is learning all the timeabout how to be a part of that culture on many levels. Social constructivism mainlyfocuses on an individual's learning that takes place because of their interactions in agroup.In Vygotsky's view, all human learning and development are bound up in activities,by which he means purposeful actions mediated by various tools (Vygotsky, 1978;Werstch, 1979). The most important of these tools is language, since it represents thesemiotic system which is the basis of human intellect (Halliday, 1994; Vygotsky, 1978).Because humans are social beings, their cognitive development is a social mediatedactivity. For language teachers, this means that they participate in those activities oflanguage learning and teaching in their in their social contexts, and their development is asocialization process. Their experience shape their thinking and beliefs. Those activitiesin turn become tools to help them think about what they and others are doing in anactivity and as building blocks for the development of more complex and creativeactivities (Hal本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。