A Survey On Vocational College English Teachers’ Grammar Teaching Beliefs In Hainan Province

Vocational education, as an important part of higher education, is gaining more attention and support from Chinese government and then winning wider social concern. For English is a required subject, English teaching in vocational education is sure to be a research hotspot attracting experts and scholars. In recent years, both home and aboard, the center of researches on teacher has been shifted from teachers’ external behaviors to their cognitive thinking, from which the concept of "teacher beliefs" was born. How do teachers’ beliefs influence teaching practice has begun getting attention. This paper focuses on the grammar teaching beliefs of teachers from vocational colleges so as to try to deal with two problems:(1) what beliefs do the college English teachers hold about grammar teaching?(2)What are the relationships between English Teachers’ Grammar Teaching Beliefs and their Common Practice of Grammar Teaching?The paper aims to help vocational college English teachers understand the relationship between their grammar teaching beliefs and the teaching practice. Then it is expected to help them adjust their teaching strategies and approaches by advancing and changing their beliefs in grammar teaching, so as to find a more effective, efficient, and reasonable way to do the grammar teaching in higher vocational education, which can arouse the students’ interests in grammar learning and make grammar teaching serve the need of cultivating the students’ English communicative ability.The survey of this paper is conducted through quantitative and qualitative research. The researcher makes a survey of 35 English teachers from 3 vocational colleges in Hainan Province about their beliefs on grammar teaching and their teaching practice, and compared these two groups of data. And six of these teachers are interviewed to further understand their beliefs on grammar teaching. The questionnaire used in this research is Andrews’s (2003) questionnaire adopted by Professor Gao Qiang (2007). And the outline of the interview is based on the questionnaire on grammar teaching belief. The data collected was analyzed by SPSS.This research result indicates:(1) This research has found English teachers in vocational colleges, both in their beliefs and teaching practice, tend to do applied and communicative grammar teaching. They emphasize the communicative and applied side of grammar and prefer to combine the traditional teaching methods with communicative methods. The teachers also consider doing excises on grammar terms and sentences patterns to be important to their grammar teaching.(2) Some differences among these teachers on their beliefs and practice exist, which are especially true in their inductive teaching and deductive teaching. These differences are thought to be caused by the personal reasons from these teachers and the English level of the students. The college and the society are also thought to be related.In the production of this paper, due to insufficient number of samples, poorness in research methods, and failure to do survey about in-class practice and test these teachers’ grammatical knowledge, which are caused by the limited research conditions, the result of this research may be affected to some extent, and it is expected that these deficiencies can be overcome in the future researches.