A Study Of English Teachers’ Beliefs In Polytechnic Colleges

In1990s, the concept of teachers’ beliefs, as one of the important aspects inteacher education, has attracted the attention of researchers. Recently, researches inthis field gradually have received heeds from researchers in China. Now, theresearches in this field are mainly conducted either quantitatively or qualitatively. Inquantitative researches, questionnaire is the norm that is most frequently used. Inforeign language learning, there have been not so many researches on teachers’beliefs.The majority of the previous researches in China on teachers’ beliefs onlyreviewed literatures abroad, with little attention paid to similar documents at home.What is more, these researches simply notice the common characters of teachers’beliefs, and few of them have ever considered whether there is particularity of theteachers’ beliefs for those in polytechnic universities.This paper studies English teachers’ beliefs in two polytechnic universities inHenan province by means of questionnaire, interview, and class observation from thesocial constructivism point of view. This paper collects data by combiningquantitative and qualitative methodologies. The quantitative instrument is thequestionnaire developed by referring to Horwizz’s BALLI (1985). The qualitativeresearch adopts semi-structured interview and class observation. Pre-observationinterview and post-observation interview are employed in the research, while for classobservation, ethnography is the method utilized to collect data. The data elicited fromquantitative instrument is processed with SPSS.17.0, and the statistics used in itinclude frequency statistics, descriptive statistics and correlation analysis. The dataobtained from qualitative instrument is transferred into words and then analyzed. Thisresearch takes as its subjects50college English teachers from polytechnic universities,6of whom are also the participants of the qualitative research.The study reveals that teachers’ beliefs in polytechnic universities have theirparticularity apart from the common characters of other types of colleges. It alsoshows that the outside academic atmosphere and the majors of the students influence teachers’ beliefs to some extent. Some teachers’ beliefs exemplify high degree ofagreement with their classroom practice while some have lower degree of agreement.All these indicate that teachers’ beliefs are dynamic, and the filtering and interactivefeatures influence teachers’ class room performance. As teachers beliefs possess thesefeatures, the author calls for the idea that teachers should develop the habit oflife-long study, and form the habit of reflection in order to improve their beliefs. Alsothe author proposes that the authorities concerned should provide necessary policysupports for teachers to complete their teaching task, and fulfill their duty ofeducation.