A Study On Pre-service English Teachers' Beliefs

With the rapid development of the world, education reform has seen its great importance in the whole process of social reform. Schools and teachers are keys in education reform, so a comprehensive understanding of what teachers do become focuses of study while it is well known that teachers'behaviors are guided by the beliefs they hold. Naturally we can say that the nature of education reform is the changing of teachers'beliefs.Most former studies put their attention on in-service teachers'beliefs and ignored the importance of pre-service teachers. This study aims to find out the beliefs held by pre-service teachers who are in their third and fourth year of university study. It is hoped that through the research, some latent problems in teachers'beliefs system could be discovered, which can have some implication for pre-service teachers'professional development. According to the aim, three research questions are raised:a. What teachers'beliefs do the investigated pre-service teachers hold in terms of teaching, learning and self-efficacy?b. What are the differences and similarities between teachers'beliefs held by junior and senior English education majors?c. What are the reasons accounting for the similarities and differences between the two groups?For the purpose of finding the answers to the above questions, 185 subjects are chosen from one university in Changchun. There are two groups in total, and 105 of them are juniors while 80 are seniors. Questionnaires are adopted as the main instrument which includes four parts. The first part is about the participants'personal information and the other three parts are designed to pry into pre-service teachers'teaching, learning and self-efficacy beliefs respectively. The researcher takes three authoritative questionnaires as references and designs the current likert-scale questionnaire which consists of sixty questions. The results of the questionnaires are calculated and analyzed by Excel 2003 which outputs the mean and standard deviation. In the part of discussion, statistics are analyzed from three dimensions, namely pre-service teachers'teaching, learning and self-efficacy beliefs. It is surprised to find out that results are sort of different from the hypothesis. The beliefs held by the investigated pre-service teachers are a little ideal and unconnected with real classroom curriculum. From another perspective, the two groups show few obvious disparities referring to concrete teachers'beliefs. There is only a matter of tendency. In terms of teaching and language learning beliefs, junior pre-service teachers reveal clear individuality while for seniors, teachers'beliefs held by different students show great similarity. In another word, teaching and learning beliefs held by senior education majors are more stable than that of juniors. However, referring to self-efficacy belief, things are different. There is hardly any difference between the two grades. It is safe to say that self-efficacy belief occupies a central position in the whole teachers'beliefs system and it is hard to be changed. Based on the analysis, it can be inferred that there are mainly two reasons which result in the differences. They are teaching practice and teachers'professional knowledge base. In a word, the research has some implications on pre-service teachers'future professional development and course setting but there may be some deviations. Some tested pre-service teachers are in a special period of finding jobs, which surely has negative effect on the results.