A Study On The Influence Of The Internship On Pre-service English Teachers' Beliefs

Teachers' beliefs have profound impacts on teachers' decisions and behaviors,which also contribute to teaching practice and teachers' professional development.Since the late 1980 s,researchers have paid much attention to teachers' beliefs.In China,the study of teachers' beliefs started later and they originated from the researches of teachers' professional development.Recently,with the development of new curriculum reform and the promulgation of students' key competences,people have realized the importance of teachers in promoting education reform.Besides,teachers' beliefs guide teaching behaviors,so they become the focus of research.Although there are many research achievements on teachers' beliefs in our country,the researches ignore the group of pre-service teachers.Pre-service teachers,as the reserve forces for teachers,represent the quality of the prospective teachers,so it is meaningful to study pre-service teachers' beliefs.The educational internship provides a platform for pre-service teachers to get in touch with teaching practice.The teaching experience in internship will inevitably affect their untested teachers' beliefs.Therefore,to study the dynamic changes of pre-service teacher's beliefs in the internship is of great significance to improve the normal education and promote the development of pre-service teachers' beliefs.This study takes pre-service English teachers as the research subject,and aims to explore the impact of internship on pre-service English teachers' beliefs.Accordingly,the research raises three research questions: 1.Before the internship,what kind of teachers' beliefs did the pre-service English teachers hold? 2.After the internship,are there any changes in the pre-service English teachers' beliefs? 3.What are the causes of these changes? To answer these questions,the study selected 69 junior English majors in Shandong Normal University as the participants and used questionnaire and interview to study their teacher's beliefs and changes.English teachers' beliefs cover five dimensions including belief about English,belief about learning,belief about learner,belief about teaching and belief about teaching as a profession.The researcher distributed questionnaires to the participants before and after the internship.The questionnaires were used to analyze the status quo and the changes of teachers' beliefs.After the internship,the participants were invited for an interview which mainly focused on the factors influencing teachers' beliefs.Finally,the data collected through the questionnaires were analyzed by SPSS 22.0 and the interviews weretranscribed into texts to further study the features of the changes and the reasons for them.Through the analysis of questionnaire data and interview texts,the author draws the following conclusions: 1.Before the internship,the beliefs of pre-service English teachers are open-minded and tend to be guided by constructivism in general,which are in line with concepts of the new curriculum reform.Among them,the belief about English teaching is the most open belief and the belief about English language is the most traditional one.Besides,the teachers' beliefs vary from person to person.2.After the internship,the pre-service English teachers' beliefs have undergone some changes,but not dramatically and the degrees of changes are different in different dimensions.Generally,pre-service English teachers have made great changes in beliefs about language,English learning and teaching as a profession.Among them,the English language beliefs are more conservative while the other two beliefs tend to be more active and open.3.During the internship,the internship schools,internship tutors,students,partners,parents,and individual reflections have had some impacts on the teachers' beliefs in different degrees.According to the results,in order to further promote the pre-service English teachers to establish open and scientific teachers' beliefs,the author puts forward some suggestions from the perspectives of normal colleges,internship schools and pre-service teachers.As for the normal colleges,they should improve the normal education curricula,highlight the normality,and set courses about teachers' beliefs.At the same time,they need to extend the education internship time and assign the college teachers to instruct pre-service teachers.As for the internship schools,they should adopt an open mind to accept pre-service teachers and assign them proper teaching tasks.Besides,they should also appoint some experienced teachers as the pre-service teachers' tutors.For pre-service teachers,they should attach importance to internship,participate in practice actively,learn theories consciously and reflect regularly on their teaching practice.