Teachers' Beliefs And Teachers' Professional Development

Since the 1960s, within both general education and second language teaching field, there has been a movement away from teacher-centered modes of learning to more learner-centered approaches. However, this "learner-centeredness" movement does not deny the importance of the teacher, nor imply that there is no role for the teacher in a learner-centered classroom, quite the contrary, it led to a reexamination of traditional teacher roles, for even the so-called innovative methods still require teachers to carry out particular roles in the classroom in order to facilitate the language learning processes. For language teachers, "there is a new, more evolved role which can be, if in some ways more challenging, also more exciting and fulfilling" (Arnold 2000).From the late 1990s, China began to enlarge the scale of the university in order to enhance the quality of citizens and promote economic development. Therefore, many new teachers are employed to meet the increasing demand of College English teaching. However, are these novice teachers qualified enough to meet the requirements of college teaching? Do they posses the ability to develop themselves professionally? Inspired by this idea, the author intends to take a close look at the beliefs novice teachers hold and their behaviors in classroom. Firstly a qualitative study (classroom observation and in-depth interview) on novice teachers was made to elicit their teaching beliefs and then a belief scale was developed on the basis of the proposed belief categories by these teachers. Secondly the author makes a quantitative study of teachers' beliefs and behaviors on teachers from four universities and colleges in Shandong province. Results from the data analysis show that novice teachers' beliefs and behaviors are closely related but there is significant difference between them. Therefore, the author tries to give some suggestions to foster novice teachers' professional development.The thesis consists of the following five chapters: Chapterâ… serves as the general introduction of sources of the current study. It includes the rationale of choosing this topic, the significance of conducting this study.Chapterâ…¡is the literature review part. Only knowing what others have done in this field can we develop our own topic. In this part, researches on teachers' beliefs, including the sources of beliefs, beliefs about learners, learning, the teacher themselves were reviewed. The novice teachers' professional development is another concern in this chapter.Chapterâ…¢is about qualitative and quantitative study on novice teachers' beliefs and behaviors. The author firstly conducted a qualitative research on college English teachers to elicit some categories of teaches' beliefs. Then a belief scale and a behavior scale were respectively developed on the basis of the qualitative study to investigate novice teachers' beliefs and behaviors. The result of the study will be elaborated on.In Chapterâ…£, the author suggests that measures from two aspects must be taken to foster novice teachers' professional development: the "outside" and the "inside" world of teachers'.Chapterâ…¤is the conclusion part. As a brief summary, this part reviewed comprehensively the progress of the thesis. Limitations of this study and suggestions for future studies were presented.