A Study On EFL Teachers' Beliefs And Their Professional Development

Nowadays, it has become a common concern of foreign language teachers and researchers at home and abroad to study teachers'professional development. When evaluating teachers'professional development, one of the most important content is their beliefs. Teachers'beliefs play an important role in their professional development.Since 1980s, foreign researchers have obtained some outstanding findings and achievements in the field of teachers'beliefs. However, in our country, the researches on teachers'beliefs are still at the beginning stage. The current situation has greatly hindered the development of EFL teaching in our country.Most of the previous researches just focus on one aspect of teachers'beliefs and their professional development. So this thesis will study EFL teachers'beliefs and professional development as a whole, trying to provide useful and helpful findings to help EFL teachers better develop themselves.Based on the previous theories and findings, this thesis gives its own definition to teachers'beliefs and categorizes five important EFL teachers'beliefs. These beliefs have huge influences on teachers'professional development (TPD). TPD is defined as"learning opportunities that engage educators'creative and reflective capacities in ways that strengthen their practice (Bredeson,2003)."It includes many aspects, and the core of TPD is to encourage the development of teachers'personal understanding and enable them to develop their own personal theories, so they can become researchers.Based on the previous theories and research findings, this thesis tries to answer the following research questions:1. What is/are the core beliefs that EFL teachers hold?2. What influences and effects that EFL teachers'beliefs have on their professional development, especially on their classroom practices? 3. During EFL teachers'professional development, will their beliefs be modified or changed?The subject of the research is 60 college English teachers coming from 3 different universities. Four instruments are employed, including questionnaire, interview, classroom observation and survey.The results of Teachers'Beliefs Investigation Questionnaire show that the general core beliefs that EFL teachers hold are beliefs about English teaching and learning.Through interview and observation, the research has proved that EFL teachers'beliefs have great influences on their professional development. EFL teachers'beliefs can either hinder or promote their professional development.The Teacher Development Survey has shown that most EFL teachers will change their beliefs during their professional development. Many factors contribute to the change of EFL teachers'beliefs.The findings of this thesis are useful and meaningful for EFL teachers'development and the development of China's EFL teaching and research.This thesis has some limitations. For example, the sample in this study is too small. Also all of the subjects are from the same province. Thus some results from this thesis seem not to be very persuasive and authoritative. So it is suggested that the future studies should avoid these limitations.