Teachers' Belief And New English Curriculum Standards For Senior High School Students

English teaching in primary schools and high schools in China are guided by new curriculum standards, New English Curriculum Standards, presently. And a whole set of matters, such as textbook, tests, or even the dominant teaching methods are under reform accordingly. The reform sparkled a heated discussion among specialists, teachers, students, parents, and many other people in relation with the education system. A lot of researches are carried out and different aspects of the new standards are discussed. However, there are only few researches on the relationship between teachers'belief and the New English Curriculum Standards.English teachers in primary schools and high schools are of vital importance in the reform as they are the people to do the actual teaching and to carry out the reform. Growing evidence indicates that teachers are highly influenced by their beliefs, which in turn are closely linked to their values, to their views of the world and to their conceptions of their place within it. English teachers as well bring their unique sets of beliefs to bear in situations and decisions related to language teaching. These beliefs are usually recognized as significant predictors for their everyday teaching practice and they unconsciously assign different meanings to the event in order to support their prior belief. What's more, these beliefs are stable sources of teachers'reference, built up over time, and related to teachers'theories of language, the nature of language teaching practice, roles of themselves as teachers, and relationships with their students.Now that we have the new standards to abide by, it is suggested that all the teachers understand the standards and recognize the importance of applying the standards into their everyday teaching practice. As a matter of fact, as we've just mentioned above, a lot of teachers feel that they have something to say about the standards. Therefore we designed a questionnaire to ask about teachers'belief on the New English Curriculum Standards. In the questionnaire we mainly asked teachers their belief on the teaching goals set by the standards, the resulting textbook and the assessment method, college entrance examination. At the same time, we asked teachers about their everyday teaching practice. Most of the questions are frequently discussed by teachers themselves both officially and unofficially.We invited teachers, with different years of teaching experiences, from 19 public senior high schools in Suzhou to participate in the survey. We discuss from a microscopic view to see if teachers'belief is in accordance with New English Curriculum Standards, how much New English Curriculum Standards really matters in teachers'mind and how big a difference it makes in their everyday teaching practice in public senior high schools in Suzhou compared with the syllabus which used to guide their English teaching practice.From the survey, we find most of the teachers are confident that they know New English Curriculum Standards well. However, when it comes to details, many teachers can just report several key aspects of the Standards. Teachers in senior high schools in Suzhou believe that their direct and most influential goals for teaching English is decided by what the English test in college entrance examination emphasize. Presently, their everyday teaching practice is affected by college entrance examination, New English Curriculum Standards, and somewhat influenced by their own belief and the textbooks.