A Case Study On Junior High School English Teachers’ Beliefs About Big Ideas And Practice In Reading Teaching Designs

Against the background of knowledge explosion and information surge,students need to memorize more knowledge than ever before.The fragmented teaching mode cannot promote the development of students’ deep learning and creative problem-solving ability.The General Senior High English Curriculum Standards(2018)points out that “English teaching should select the subject content,take the big ideas as the core,and make the curriculum content structured”.The cultivation of students’ core competence depends on the integrated teaching mode,while big ideas are the fulcrum of this teaching.A big idea is a deep-seated,meaningful and transferrable core concept,which can connect fragmented knowledge points and stimulate students to think deeply and logically.It can also provide valuable conceptual tools for teachers to organize teaching content.A reading passage carries language knowledge and cultural connotation,contains value orientation and way of thinking,and is an important supporter to develop students’ core competence.Using big ideas to guide reading teaching designs can enable teachers to analyze texts pertinently,enable students to learn texts systematically and pay attention to the core content in the process of exploring reading materials.At present,the teaching design under the guidance of big concept is the focus of research by scholars at home and abroad.Teachers’ concept and their teaching practice are directly related to the classroom teaching effect.Teachers should fully understand the big ideas in English teaching and apply the big ideas in reading teaching designs.As an important thought to guide teaching designs,big ideas should be valued and practiced by teachers.However,there are still gaps in the research on teachers’ understanding and practice of big ideas.Therefore,knowing teachers’ beliefs about big ideas and how they make reading teaching designs is one of the greatest breakthroughs in teaching reform and teaching research.This research aims to answer three questions:(1)How do junior school English teachers understand big ideas and reading teaching designs based on big ideas?(2)What is the relationship between English teachers’ beliefs and their practice of designing reading teaching?(3)What are the factors that influence English teachers’ beliefs and their reading teaching designs? In order to answer the questions,this research adopts semi-structured interview,semi-structured interview and sample collection as research methods.It takes five English teachers from a junior high school in Chengdu as the participants to delve into how they think of big ideas and how they apply big ideas in teaching practice.Meanwhile,it explores the relationship between their practice and beliefs and discusses the factors leading to the current situation.This research uses Nvivo to comb and code the data of the study and achieves the interrater agreement through inter-coding by another researcher.It is found that the five teachers’ beliefs about big ideas are implicit,conscious but verbal.Almost all teachers can explain their understanding of the essence,function,characteristics,and extraction of big ideas by referring to their teaching designs;at the same time,when teachers explain how they make teaching designs,they always consider big ideas.However,after analyzing these teaching designs,the beliefs reflected by teaching designs are not completely consistent with teachers’ descriptions in the interview and the relationship between their beliefs and practice is a complex unity of similarities and differences.The factors affecting teachers’ beliefs and practice are divided into internal factors(including teachers’ interest in theories,teachers’ learning and teaching experience,and teachers’ personality)and external factors(mainly contextual factors,including macro-,meso-and micro-dimension).In order to make more teachers adopt the teaching design model based on big ideas and give future researchers a new research direction,this study puts forward corresponding suggestions from the perspectives of teachers’ consciousness,the organization of teachers’ groups,the management of schools and the requirement of examination system.