Teacher's Beliefs And Language Teaching

This dissertation aims to explore Chinese language teachers' belief systems into the contents that constitute the belief systems, the relevance of their beliefs to the responsive actions, and the differentiations that exist between the popular teachers and the moderate teachers. It attempts to derive valuable implications for teacher education and pedagogy from a qualitative study. There firstly appears a general interpretation of the notion of belief systems and the interrelated underlying components through reviewing a bank of literatures. In general agreement with the constructivist view of teaching, the analyses of cognition and cognition development are proceeding ranging from the strengthening of belief awareness to belief rebirth. Then, it examines how the implicit conceptions influence the responsive teaching practices through tracing the theoretic origins based on the analysis of mainstream assumptions about teacher's knowledge base and decision-making. Especially, it raises a new teacher education model that is accessible to Chinese teachers based on an analysis of three prevailing models and illustrates the basic principles teacher education programs should follow to reinforce the establishment of professionalism. How teacher expertise is nourished and sharpened and how the system under which the effective teaching can take place are recommended. In the final conclusion, the dissertation claims the shining points and drawbacks of the research work, and provides a number of suggestions for further discussion.