A Study On The Relationship Between Teachers' Beliefs About Reading Strategies And Classroom Practice

The research on teachers' belief has become one of the most active fields in teacher education system in the past ten years.Most scholars took the language teaching as a whole and studied the teachers' language teaching beliefs.As far as the specific teaching content,there are a lot of scholars focus on grammar teaching and there are a few scholars focus on reading teaching.Reading teaching is an important way to help learners learn linguistic knowledge and improve their comprehensive ability.Therefore,it is necessary to study the English teachers' reading teaching beliefs.In the past,most researches on teachers' beliefs focused on college English teachers.The study on the basic-level English teachers' belief still insufficient.Based on the review of the literature,this research hopes to help English teachers fully understand their beliefs about reading strategies and reading teaching practice,then improve their reading teaching practice.This research aims to explore two questions:(1)To what degree the junior middle school English teachers' beliefs about reading strategies are corresponding to their teaching practice?(2)For the relationship between teachers' beliefs about reading strategies and reading teaching practice,is there any difference between the novice teacher and the experienced teacher? The subjects of the research are 31 English teachers from two junior middle schools of Zhangye in Gansu province.In order to explore the difference between the novice teacher and the experienced teacher on the relationship between their beliefs about reading strategies and reading teaching practice,a case study was conducted on two English teachers in this research.This research adopted a quantitative and qualitative method.First,31 questionnaires were administered to English teachers.Then,a novice teacher and an experienced teacher were chosen to have the semi-structured interview and classroom observation.The quantitative data from the questionnaire were analyzed with SPSS22.0 and the qualitative data were transcribed and categorized.The quantitative and qualitative data are supplemented.According to the analysis of the data,the present thesis obtained the following major results.(1)In general,the junior middle school English teachers who participated the survey acknowledged the importance of reading strategies and reading strategies can help students read better.But there is a significant difference between their beliefs about reading strategies and reading teaching practice,which mainly concentrated on cognitive strategies.(2)In terms of the novice teacher and the experienced teacher in this research,both of them affirmed the importance of reading strategies in reading teaching and there is no significant difference in their reading teaching beliefs.(3)In terms of the relationship between their belief about reading strategies and teaching practice,the novice teacher was affected by the students' level and other factors.There is a significant difference between the novice teacher's beliefs about reading strategies and reading teaching practice.The beliefs about reading strategies of the experienced teacher are basically consistent with her reading teaching practice.Meanwhile,the experience teacher can change her teaching strategies to improve the reading teaching.