Pre-service EFL Teachers’ Beliefs About Language Learning And Teaching And Their Relationships With English Proficiency

Teachers play a key role in the education reform, and their behaviors are guided by their beliefs aboutlanguage learning and teaching. The teachers’ belief system is their recognition of the teaching objectives,value, teaching content and teaching process. The study aims to investigate pre-service English teachers’beliefs about language learning and teaching to provide any implications on their professional developmentand courses designing.This paper addresses the following research questions:1) what are pre-service EFL teachers’ mainbeliefs about language learning and teaching?2) Do those beliefs change over the study?3) What is therelationship between those pre-service teachers’ beliefs and their EFL proficiency? The questionnairesincluding Horwitz’s Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory and Rebecca de Garcia etc ForeignLanguage Attitude Survey are adopted to survey the pre-service English teachers’ beliefs about languagelearning and teaching. The subjects of this study are100senior students major in English studying at theNorthwest Normal University. The research duration is from the second semester of the third year to thefirst semester of the fourth year, during which they have to take the English Language Education Courseand Second Language Acquisition course in the second semester of the third year, then take part in theeducation internship in the first semester of the forth year, the aim is to examine whether the specific coursehas an influence on the subjects’ beliefs about language learning and teaching.The results indicate that:(1) the data of questionnaires indicates that the mean of the difficulty ofsecond language learning is the lowest and the mean of the foreign language aptitude is the highest, itshows the subjects more believe learners are born with a special ability of language learning. On thedifficulty of language learning, the subjects consider English as a difficult language which will take5-10years to learn. On the foreign language aptitude, they hold that someone is born with special foreignlanguage aptitude, but it doesn’t mean everyone owns this ability. On the nature of language learning, theyregard the vocabulary and grammar as the most important things in learning a foreign language. On thelearning strategies, they stress the importance of the repeat and practice. On the beliefs about languageteaching, the subjects suggest the syntactical errors are natural and inevitable parts of language acquisition,and they also emphasize the significance of the teaching devices in foreign language teaching.(2) there is astatistically significant change in the subjects’ pre-existing beliefs about EFL learning and teaching afterthey take the related professional courses and the education internship: On the beliefs about language learning, they become more confident in their foreign language aptitude and they hold English is a biteasier language, and they express relatively objective evaluation on the significance of vocabulary andgrammar, as well as the function of the learning skills such as listening, speaking, reading and writing andthe learning strategies such as repeat and practice and error correction, and they gradually realize theimportance of context and target language culture in foreign language learning process. On the beliefsabout language teaching, the subjects begin to pay more attention to the teaching devices and the stimulatedreal-life situations, they suppose the learners should be in the center position to cultivate their self-learningcompetence.(3) The correlation research finds that there is a positive correlation between the foreignlanguage aptitude, the nature of language learning, the learning strategies and their English proficiency, anda negative correlation between the difficulty of second language learning and learners’ English proficiency;Therefore, the findings in this research will demonstrate how pre-service teachers’ beliefs about languagelearning and teaching evolve within the specific course and teaching practice, and have practicalimplications for course design and evaluation in teacher education programs.