A Case Study On The Effect Of Senior High School English Teachers' Beliefs On Teaching Practices

The curriculum reform has been implemented in many countries worldwide to meet international challenge at the turn of the century, which attached great importance to a shift from teacher-centered teaching mode to student-centered one. A great amount of literature review indicates that there is a lack of empirical research on teachers' beliefs with respect to learner-centered instruction promoted by curriculum reform in the high school. Only a few researches focus on the teachers from high school. Therefore, the author conducted a qualitative research to explore three teachers' beliefs and their learner-centered instruction in a high school and factors which influence teachers' beliefs and teaching practices.Two research questions are raised: 1) What teachers' beliefs do the senior high school English teachers hold? 2) Are teachers' beliefs consistent with their teaching practices? If not, what factors influence teachers' beliefs and teaching practices? In order to seek answers to these two questions, the author conducted a case study by selecting three informants in the Affiliated High School of Guangzhou University and adopting pre-observation interviews, observations, post-observation interviews and documents study to collect data. The three informants were interviewed before and after classroom observations and their teaching practices were respectively observed twice.Based on the data analysis, the major findings are as follows:Firstly, in the aspect of the nature of language, the three informants all believe that the teaching goal of language teaching should be transmitting the language knowledge in the examination-oriented learning environment. As to the roles of the teacher and the students, the three informants, to a certain extent, hold different opinions.Secondly, the three informants' beliefs are mostly consistent with their classroom practices but partly inconsistent with their real teaching practices. Furthermore, the consistency and inconsistency between their beliefs and teaching practices originated from the promoting and obstructive factors. For example, in-depth analysis of thestudents, shortage of time, overloaded work, examination system and so on. It is obvious that it is a big challenge for them to implement learner-centered teaching mode.Hence, the results suggest that the leaders in the school should give their helping hand and support the innovation that is conducive to the improvement of teaching quality. Furthermore, National Curriculum Reform has constantly advocated learner-centered instruction. Thus, learner-centered instruction should be taken into serious consideration in language teaching in order to fully implement national curriculum reform.