A Study On High School English Teachers’ Beliefs About Language Learning In The Eighth Farming Division Of The Xinjiang Production And Construction Corps

People’s actions tend to be influenced by their beliefs consciously or unconsciously. In order to make informed practices in their day-to-day teaching, teachers need to be consciously aware of what their beliefs about learning are(Williams & Burden, 2000). There were many studies on language teachers’ beliefs(Burns, 1992, Kagan, 1992, Freeman, 2002, Borg, 2003, Liu, 2004,Wang, 2009, Xu, 2012), but there are few studies on English teachers’ beliefs about language learning(Banya & Cheng,1997, Barcelors, 2000, Mark, Sean & David,2010, Zhao, 2006, Qi, 2011, Li, 2013), and studies for high school English teachers’ in China are even less(Hu,2008). Therefore, this research chooses 109 high school English teachers in the Eighth Farming Division of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps as the subjects, to survey the high school English teachers’ beliefs about language learning by means of the questionnaire of Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory(BALLI) made by Horwitz for foreign language teachers. SPSS(19.0) is used to account the percentage of each answer for the 34 questions, and to find the factors that influence the beliefs about language learning through pre-observation interviews for six teachers, the relationship between the beliefs about language learning and practice and the reasons for that by means of post-observation interviews and classroom observations.Findings of the study indicates that high school English teachers in the Eighth Farming Division of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps show the highest level of approval of beliefs about the nature of language learning(m=4.2111), and the lowest level of approval of beliefs about the difficulty of language learning(m= 2.9926), besides, teachers have similar beliefs of language learning aptitude(m=3.5859), learning and communication strategies(m=3.4527) and motivation(m=3.9056). The factors that affect teachers’ beliefs about language learning are as follows: personal experience, teaching process, social environments, and so on. According to the six teachers’ case studies, there is more consistency than difference on the relationship between beliefs and practice, and four of them show a big difference between the learning beliefs about communication strategies and their practice because of the educational policies and so on.This research enables the high school English teachers to have a better understanding of the importance of language learning beliefs, and encourage them to change some passive beliefs about language learning, and minimize the barriers in English teaching. This research will help teachers set up active learning beliefs about language learning, improve teaching behaviors, and enhance teaching efficiency. The results of the research contribute to reveal the importance of beliefs about language learning and teaching reflection in their self-development, and to give some references on teachers’ training for educational administrations.