A Study On High School English Teachers’ Beliefs And Their Relationship With Teaching Practice

In2013, the Ministry of Education announced reforms about College Entrance Examination. Whether English should be included in Gaokao became the most controversial topic. Together with the Curriculum Reform put forward several years ago, English teachers in high schools are facing great challenges. Educators, teachers and people related are taking a new look at the role of English teaching as well as English teachers. But there is no doubt that as the society develops, English will still earn popularity all around China.In recent years, the studies focusing on teachers’ beliefs have emerged continually. A large amount of researches prove that teachers’ beliefs play an unignorable role in the practical classroom teaching. To investigate teachers’ beliefs and their relationship with classroom practice could help us deep the understanding of teachers’ beliefs and the influence on their teaching methods and approaches. Previous studied on this topic have got great achievements, but there is no agreement on the issue whether teachers’ beliefs and their teaching practice are consistent or not. Also, among those studies, most of them select university English teachers as the research objects but neglect the importance of high school English teachers.In the present research, the author employs Xu’s five dimensions about English teachers’ beliefs as the theoretical framework. Through questionnaire, interviews and classroom observation,25high school English teachers, who have just finished their one-year teacher training programme in Central China Normal University, are taken as subjects to investigate what kind of beliefs they are holding now and whether their teaching beliefs are consistent with their teaching practice.After data collection and analysis of the data, the following results are obtained.1. English teachers’ beliefs are a complex system which changes with the development of the society.2. There are some similarities between teachers’ beliefs about learning and teaching. A majority of participating teachers believe English learning contains many facets and learning can happen besides classroom. Also teachers are paying more attention to Ss and individuals, but their views about teaching, to some extent, is still conservative.3. A majority of the participating teachers believe that English teaching is a profession that only those who have solid professional knowledge can be qualified for this job.4. During the classroom observation and the interviews, the author finds that classroom practice is basically consistent with the teachers’ beliefs. Advanced teachers’ beliefs are pushed forward by the observed teacher. The learners are treated as partners and friends, Ss’ interests are highly emphasized. Though the teacher adopts traditional methods in most of her teaching, she reflects a lot and tries to make innovation in her class to make the teaching more effective. She tries to find a balance between the current testing system and Ss’ all-round development.Therefore, teachers need to be given more opportunities like the EFL training programme to improve themselves. They also need to pay more attention to advanced teaching methods and theories to build up their own belief system. Teachers’ frequent reflection is also needed to make teaching more effective.The author points out the deficiencies of the study and provides suggestions for future researches at the end of the thesis.