A Study Of Secondary School EFL Teachers' Beliefs About Classroom Management And Actual Practices

Classroom management plays an important role in keeping a highly efficient classroom as managing classroom is a primary method to establish a positive learning environment.According to Freeman,Anderman and Jensen(2007),a well-managed classroom generates a stress-free environment where positive learning is experienced,and students feel increased sense of belonging to classroom.Studies on classroom management have attracted more and more attentions among domestic and overseas researchers in recent years.However,few empirical studies have been conducted to explore secondary school EFL teachers' beliefs and actual practices of classroom management in China.This study aimed to investigate secondary school EFL teachers' classroom management beliefs and their actual practices by adopting three research methods including questionnaire,interview and classroom observation.In the process of quantitative data collection,there were 310 EFL teachers from secondary schools participating in the stage of questionnaire.In the qualitative data collection,9 EFL teachers were interviewed to unravel their beliefs of classroom management and their attitudes towards the mismatches between beliefs and practices;and 9 English classes were observed to explore teachers' actual practices of classroom management.Drawn from quantitative and qualitative analysis,this study obtained the following major findings: 1)Teachers' beliefs towards classroom management were inclined to be interactionalist.At the same time,teachers' actual practices of classroom management also tended to be interactionalist statistically.Despite that,based on the qualitative analysis,teachers were more controlling on their behaviors of managing classroom in practice than their stated beliefs towards classroom management.2)Teachers' self-efficacy level of classroom management was slightly higher than medium.It showed that teachers who had higher level of self-efficacy classroom management would be significantly less controlling in the actual practices of people management and would be significantly more controlling in the beliefstowards instructional management.3)According to quantitative analysis,teachers' self-efficacy of classroom management and their teaching experience were found to be the contributing factors to the mismatches between classroom management beliefs and actual practices.The results of qualitative analysis revealed that both external and internal factors residing in the context were related to the mismatches of beliefs and practices.To be specific,the external factors stemmed from students' low proficiency,bad manners,and negative learning attitude,school context of discipline and broad educational context of examination-oriented education.The internal factors included teachers' inability of internalization of theory-based beliefs,their lack of insight into students' thoughts and perceptions,and job burnout.4)Teachers held a normal attitude towards the inconsistency of beliefs and practices and they expected to make efforts to shorten the mismatches between beliefs and practices in the complexity of classroom.In the light of the above findings,the research put forward some suggestions for bridging the mismatches of secondary school EFL teachers' beliefs about classroom management and actual practices from several aspects.Moreover,the thesis ends with the limitations of the study and recommendations for further study.