An Inquiry Into The Beliefs Held By Junior High School English Teachers

One of the major strands in the teacher cognition research is teachers’ beliefs.There have been some researches at home on teachers’ beliefs and classroom teachingpractice, teachers’ beliefs and teachers’ professional development, teachers’ beliefsand students’ affective factors in English learning. Most studies are about theintroduction to the research results made by western researchers, and few locatedstudies are carried out. Among those studies, most of them focus on the universityteachers. Therefore, it is a new scope to investigate beliefs held by junior high schoolEnglish teachers through a narrative inquiry.This study is to investigate junior high school English teachers’ beliefs, toexplore the features of those beliefs and the relationship between teachers’ beliefs andclassroom practice. Therefore, this research intends to try to answer the followingthree questions:1. What beliefs do the junior high school English teachers hold?2.What features do these beliefs possess?3. How do these beliefs exert influence onteachers’ practice?The study employs a qualitative study of a narrative inquiry into five expertjunior high school English teachers in Liaoning Province. After four-monthdata-collection and analysis, the author finds that junior high school English teachershold some shared beliefs in career, in English teaching and in students. However,some teachers’ beliefs are individualized. Teachers’ beliefs are subjective andpersonally-constructed. What’s more, they are culturally and contextually bound. Teachers’ beliefs have their roots in teachers’ practices and experience and guideteachers’ behavior. In turn, teachers’ practices and experience mirror the beliefs heldby them. But there is inconsistency between teachers’ beliefs and their practice. Somebeliefs held by these teachers change with the enrichment of their experiences and thechange of the practices.