A Study Of Middle School English Teachers’ Grammar Teaching Beliefs And Classroom Practices

Recently researches on teaching have attempted to understand teachers from the "inside" rather than from the "outside", since it is accepted that understanding teacher beliefs is essential to improving teaching practices and teacher education programs. There have been the numbers of studies on college teachers’beliefs in China, few ones on middle school teachers’ beliefs not to mention their grammar teaching beliefs. The New Curriculum reform seeks to start teachers to adopt new and better practice, so first it is necessary to know the beliefs of teachers and how it comes about. Currently middle school teachers focus on grammar rules itself, and seldom to cultivate students’ grammar application ability, Therefore there is a need to understand the underlying beliefs of in-service English teachers about the importance of grammar in learning English and about grammar teaching, and to know their classroom practices. Understanding teachers’beliefs may improve their teaching practices and help in suggesting effective implications for implementation of teachers’professional development.This study explores the interconnections between teachers’grammar teaching beliefs and their classroom practices. Focuses on the main questions:What grammar teaching beliefs do English teachers hold? What are the teachers’ actual classroom practices? Whether teachers’beliefs correspond to their classroom practices? What factors cause such consistency or inconsistency? The study lasted for two months by using the questionnaire, interview and classroom observation research instruments. Questionnaire and interview explored teachers’ beliefs and their self reported practices. The aim of classroom observation is to evaluate the teaching. Rather, assessing the teachers’beliefs and reported practices corresponded to what actually happened in the classroom. It was also a form of data triangulation.The major findings according to the research questions are briefly summarized as the following:First, one strong central belief was grammar teaching is very important and the teachers regarded grammar teaching as transmitting the process of explaining grammar rules and did not come in sight to make a contextual relation between grammar instructions. Second, there is not high degree of correspondence between teachers’ beliefs and their observed practices. Third, conflicting beliefs, Contextual Factors, the degree of teacher’s professional motivation, teachers’ personalities and other unavoidable situational factors were seen to be responsible for why conflicts between beliefs and practices exist.Findings indicate that teachers must be aware that they should keep continuous learning and changing, learning and taking suggestions from others. Pre-service education alone is not adequate to properly prepare a teacher for a lifetime of teaching. It is necessary to establish a schools cultures climate to encourage teachers’ development.