A Study On Beliefs About Language Learning Of English Majors With High And Low Proficiencies And Their Teachers

Linguistic researchers have shifted their focus from investigating effective teaching methods to exploring learners" individual difference since 1970s. Being an important clement in impacting on language learning and teaching, beliefs have become one of the key focuses for linguistics researchers. However, it was ignored in China till 1980s.Growing evidence and researches on beliefs have shown the importance of them. Learners' and teachers' beliefs about language learning influence their behavior. Therefore this study aims to answer three questions to explore the general beliefs that English majors with high and low proficiencies and their teachers hold. Furthermore, if more similarities on beliefs with teachers lead to students" high proficiencies has been tried to clarify.This study takes 140 English majors and 37 teachers as subjects. Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory and the achievement scores of TEM4 are used as instruments to collect quantitative data. The questionnaires are designed to elicit responses in six categories: foreign language aptitude, the difficulty of language learning, the nature of language learning, learning and communication strategies, motivations and attributions. The students are divided into two high and low proficient groups based on their TEM4 scores. The collected data according to the BALLI for students and teachers separately are analyzed with SPSSI3.0 using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlational analysis and independent-samples t-tests. Results indicate that students and teachers hold common beliefs and also differences exist in each category: they admit the existence of the gifted person, but pay more attention to effort; they consider English as a language of medium difficulty which needs long time to lcam. For college students and teachers, grammar is no longer the emphasis in learning and teaching, they focus on the culture aspects and influence.As to the difference between students with high and low proficiencies and the similarity with the teachers in beliefs about language learning, students with high proficiencies hold more accordance in beliefs with their teachers, especially in the category of learning communication strategies. According to the results of Pearson correlational analysis, different beliefs in motivation and communication strategies are the main factors for their different proficiencies. The accordance in beliefs facilitate the students with high proficiencies to be more confident and active in learning, while the mismatch in beliefs becomes the obstacle for students with low proficiencies.Further discussions are also processed followed by some significant implication both on students and teachers. Suggestions are proposed to develop facilitative beliefs and to prevent inhibitive beliefs. Students should be autonomous in learning and try to find their appropriate strategies. Teachers need to reflect themselves frequently and pay much attention to their professionalism. All the findings pave the way for the further researches in language learning and teaching.