A Survey Study On Senior High School English Teachers' Status Quo Of Teaching Beliefs And Teaching Behaviors In Reading

In recent years,with the further development of researches in the field of foreign language teaching and teachers' cognition,studies on Senior High School English teachers' beliefs have gradually become the focus of scholars at home and abroad.As the driving force of teachers'teaching behaviors,teachers' beliefs have an important impact on the actual effect of classroom teaching.High School English teaching of reading is an important part of English teaching,which is also an effective way to help students learn English and improve their comprehensive ability of the language.The research questions addressed in this thesis are:1)What is the status quo of Senior High School English teachers' teaching beliefs in reading?2)What is the status quo of Senior High School English teachers' teaching behaviors of reading?3)What are the differences between Senior High School English teacher's reading beliefs and their reading behaviors in terms of teaching?Both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted in the study.The quantitative research mainly involves a self-designed questionnaire,which is divided into four categories of Senior High School English teacher's reading beliefs and their reading behaviors:Linguistic knowledge,Reading purpose,Reading process and Source of material.The questionnaires are handed out to 108 Senior High School teachers from four senior high schools in Yangzhou and finally 100 are found valid.Then,the data is processed by SPSS 18.0.The qualitative research is a semi-structured interview with three students being selected from those whose questionnaires are considered valid.The interview is carried out in Chinese and the whole process is tape-recorded.Afterwards,the results are transcribed into English and the transcriptions of the interview are carefully analyzed.Detailed analysis of both quantitative and qualitative research yields the following findings:Firstly,the status quo of teachers' teaching belief in reading is as follows:Among the four categories,teachers believe Linguistic knowledge the most important,and next to it are Reading purposes,Source of material and Reading process.In the category Linguistic knowledge,the teaching of Vocabulary and Grammar are considered significant.Besides,Translating long and difficult sentences is attached less importance to,for teachers think the ability of translation is not so demanding as vocabulary and grammar.As for Reading purpose,Cultivating interest in reading,Training critical thinking and Training writing ability are all the important purposes that teachers believe,but they consider Passing exams is not the ultimate purpose of reading.When it comes to Source of material,teachers lay emphasis on Finishing enough reading exercises and Increasing after-class reading,while Reciting useful sentences in the text is not regarded as the important and effective reading material.With regard to Reading process,specific items such as Understanding the relationship between paragraphs,Guessing the meaning of the words,Skimming,Scanning and Finding the main idea are necessary processes to train students' reading competence.However,processes like Understanding the text genre and Retelling the text are not important in the teaching of reading.Secondly,the status quo of teachers;teaching behaviors is as follows:Among the four categories,Source of material is adopted with the highest frequency,and next to it are Linguistic knowledge,Reading purpose and Reading process.In terms of Source of material,Finishing enough reading exercises and Increasing after-class reading are adopted most frequently,but Reciting useful sentences in the text is seldom assigned by teachers as reading materials that should be used.As for Linguistic knowledge,Vocabulary and Grammar are most frequently taught in reading class.Besides,Translating long and difficult sentences is seldom employed by teachers.With regard to Reading purpose,teachers frequently try to help students Pass exams and Cultivate interest in reading.However,they rarely Train writing ability of the students in the reading class.When it comes to Reading process,specific item adopted at highest level of frequency is Finding the main idea.Processes like Knowing background information and Answering questions are also often adopted.Meanwhile,processes which are used at low frequency level are Making outline and Retelling the text.Thirdly,some differences have been found between teachers'beliefs and their behaviors.The biggest difference exists in the category of Reading purpose,in which Training writing ability is considered important but actually seldom adopted.The second biggest difference exists in the category of Linguistic knowledge,in which Reading the text aloud is viewed as important but not frequently used.The smallest difference occurs in the category of Reading process.Specifically,major differences exist in items such as Reading the text aloud,Skimming,Making outline,Retelling the text and Finishing enough reading exercises,which are used at a low frequency level in the actual classroom teaching compared with the level of importance teachers attach to.In light of the findings,this paper makes some pedagogical implications for Senior High School English teachers.Firstly,teachers should keep updating their teaching beliefs in reading,such as knowledge in teaching theories and approaches.Secondly,they should make the utmost of the reading classes and pay attention to their classroom practices.Thirdly,they should realize the discrepancy of their teaching beliefs and behaviors and shorten the discrepancy so as to carry out the teaching of reading more effectively.