A Survey On English Teachers' Beliefs About Grammar Teaching In Senior High Schools

With the development of modern education,people are increasingly aware that teachers who have their own beliefs are the decision-makers of reflective spirit(Brog,2006).Teachers' beliefs rather than teachers' knowledge have a significant influence on classroom practice.The majority of researchers focus on current situation as a whole,so specific attention to teachers' belief about grammar is lacking.A multitude of researches have explored the factors that can shape teachers' beliefs,but few of them pay attention to factors on teachers' beliefs about grammar teaching.The subjects of these researches are college English teachers rather than English teachers in senior high schools.Therefore,this study aims to find out the overall situation of English teachers' beliefs about grammar teaching,and factors influencing English teachers' beliefs about grammar teaching from three senior high schools in country towns of GuiLin,hoping to build up positive grammar teaching beliefs,which will promote professional development of English teachers.In this study,questionnaires and interviews are used as the research instruments to investigate the overall situations of English teachers' beliefs about grammar teaching from senior high schools in country towns of GuiLin.The author analyzes the result by means of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis.The subjects are 46 English teachers in senior high schools from three country towns in GuiLin,that is,Xing'an senior high school,Lingchuan senior high school and LinGui senior high school.The Questionnaire on Teachers' Beliefs about Grammar Teaching in this paper is based on others' researches,such as Andrews(2003),Zheng Xinmig(2004),Mohamed(2006).On the basis of the previous researchers,the author has made some adjustments according to grammar teaching procedures.After the pilot study,the internal reliability of the questionnaires is 0.857.The questionnaire covers five dimensions:teachers' beliefs about grammar cognition,teachers' beliefs about teachers and students' roles,teachers' beliefs about grammar teaching,teachers' beliefs about students' grammar learning and teachers'beliefs about the assessment of grammar learning.This study addresses two research questions:(1)What is the overall situation of teachers' beliefs about grammar teaching of senior high schools in country town of GuiLin?(2)What are the factors that can influence their grammar teaching beliefs?The results show that teachers in senior high schools have a relatively positive belief about grammar teaching;the major factors influencing the formation of teachers' beliefs about grammar teaching are teachers' own learning experiences,curricular policy,time constraints as well as pressure of national matriculation test.Based on the findings,some suggestions are put forward for the development of English teachers and for the efficiency of English teaching in senior high schools.Teachers should develop the awareness of holding positive grammar teaching belief and enhance reflecting in the process of teaching grammar.For schools,they should attach importance to teachers' educational training about how to teach grammar effectively.Teachers should teach grammar by integrating with communicative activities.