A Case Study Of Senior High School English Teachers' Beliefs And Classroom Practices In Reading Instruction

While there is a growing literature on ESL teachers' beliefs and classroom teaching practices,relatively few studies have been conducted on the senior high school English teachers' beliefs and classroom practices in reading instruction.This current study aims to present senior high school English teachers' beliefs and classroom practices in reading instruction,addresses the consistency and inconsistency between their beliefs and classroom practices in reading instruction,and explores the influencing factors so that it can support teachers to improve their cognition and reflection about reading teaching.The study is carried out to answer three research questions.Firstly,what beliefs do the senior high school English teachers hold in reading instruction? Secondly,what classroom practices do the senior high school English teachers hold in reading instruction? Thirdly,Is there any inconsistency existing between senior high school English teachers' beliefs and their classroom practices in reading instruction? If yes,what are the factors influencing the inconsistency and consistency? Quantitative and qualitative studies are adopted in this study.Firstly,the quantitative study,dealing with 36 English teachers from senior one,two,three,uses a beliefs' and classroom practices' questionnaire technique borrowed from a previous researcher.In addition,3 English teachers are involved in the qualitative study in which they are interviewed and observed in the classroom.Firstly,the results of the questionnaire reveal that teachers hold important beliefs in reading instruction in four aspects.Teachers give priority to reading purposes,especially cultivating interest.In addition,they emphasize the importance of the schema theory,of which vocabulary,the text genre and background knowledge are attached importance to.In their mind,they fully affirm the importance of reading strategies,especially scanning,skimming,finding the main idea,translating long and difficult sentences,reading the text aloud,understanding the relation between paragraphs and answering questions.Among them,some teachers highly emphasize passages in the textbook.Findings indicate that reading purpose is adopted with the highest frequency,and next to it are reading strategies,source of material and the schema theory.In terms of reading purposes,the purposes of helping students pass exams and cultivating interest in reading are frequently conducted.With regard to reading strategies,scanning,skimming,finding the main idea,reading the text aloud,and answering questions are the frequent practices conducted by teachers.As for source of material,the one most often practiced is teaching passages in the textbook.When it comes to the schema theory,some teachers often teach background knowledge,the text genre and grammar.Some inconsistencies have been found between teachers' beliefs and their classroom teaching practices.The biggest inconsistency exists in reading purposes,in which gaining experiences,cultivating interest in reading,training critical thinking as well as training writing ability are considered important but are actually not frequently conducted.The smallest difference occurs in the category of the schema theory.Besides,major inconsistency exists in reading strategies,such as translating long and difficult sentences,guessing the meaning of the words,finding the main idea,making summary,retelling the text,predicting next sentence or paragraph,understanding the relation between paragraphs and monitoring understanding while reading,which are used at a lower frequency level in the actual classroom teaching compared with the level of importance teachers attach to.As for source of materials,some teachers know the importance of English novels or magazines in English reading,but they do not truly teach reading through these materials.What's more,there exists a gap between teachers' beliefs and classroom practices in effective EFL reading teaching.Finally,the study reveals five factors influencing the consistencies and inconsistencies between senior high school English teachers' beliefs and classroom practices in reading instruction,including teachers' theory-based beliefs and reflection,students' proficiency level and characteristics,school's requirements,teachers' ability and the broad educational context.