A Narrative Inquiry Into The Development Of The Beginning English Teacher's Beliefs

Teachers' beliefs are the core of teachers, cognition researches. Teachers' beliefs are teachers' personal implicit assumptions about how to deal with certain situations in teaching. They are formed on the basis of teachers' personal knowledge and experience and would determine teachers' behaviours in classroom teaching and management. The development of the beginning English teacher's beliefs symbolizes his overall professional development.Researchers generally agree that teachers' beliefs development is influenced by both internal factors and external factors. But the previous researches mainly rely on theoretical analysis, and they cannot explain how the influences take place in detail.The empirical studies on teachers' beliefs development are still insufficient. Due to the implicitness of teachers' beliefs, simple classroom observation and description of teachers' behaviours are not able to demonstrate teachers' beliefs completely,which necessitates case studies with data collected through in-depth interviews.The present narrative inquiry, based on the classification of English teachers beliefs put forward by Xu Quan(2012), set out to explore the beliefs of a beginning English teacher, with the aim of finding out the changes in his English teaching view,teachers/learners' role view and English teaching professional view. On the basis of a discussion of the factors that influence the beginning English teacher's beliefs, the researcher provided some suggestions to other beginning teachers, pre-service teachers as well as teacher educators. The research involved three main puzzles:(1) What were the participant's beliefs before he became an in-service teacher?(2) Did these beliefs change after he began to work? How did these changes happen?(3) What were the contributing factors of these changes?The participant of this narrative inquiry was Bertie (pseudonym), who graduated from the M. Ed. (Master of Education) programme of CCNU in June, 2016. He taught in a public primary school in Xiamen. Apart from some practicum experience and part-time teaching experience, he never taught as an in-service teacher before.Therefore, he could be regarded as a representative of beginning English teachers.It was found that although many of Bertie's beliefs remained consistent with his previous beliefs,the work experience shaped Bertie's beliefs development in a subtle way. On the whole, the development of his English teaching view, teachers/learmers'role view and English teaching professional view was featured with a trend of transition from teacher centeredness to student centeredness.The development of Bertie's beliefs was influenced by some internal factors and external factors. Internal factors included his characteristics,critical reflection,previous experience and strong beliefs, teaching practice, and continuous reading and learning. External factors were the macro national policies on primary school English teaching and the climate in the teachers' community.Suggestions fell into three aspects: first, in order to achieve better professional development, beginning English teachers should be encouraged to carry on with creative teaching practice, critical reflection and continuous learning and reading.Second, pre-service teachers should accumulate more experience and contact students of different levels so that they could be better prepared for future work. Third, teacher educators should lay more emphasis on the beliefs formation of pre-service teachers,along with the construction of teaching practicum.