Changes Of The Fulltime Edm Students' Beliefs About English Grammar Teaching Under Communicative Principles During Teaching Practice

'The National English Language Curriculum Standards', which emphasizes the importance of developing students'communicative competence through the process of foreign language learning in secondary schools was issued in 2001. The new curriculum, based on communicative approach, favors that learning English is for spontaneous communication and the English-learning environment should be more meaning-focused, task-based and culture-inserted. English teaching should care more about students'attitude and affection. Grammar instruction, as a crucial part in English classrooms, should also be integrated into communicative approach and be carried out through various tasks and meaningful activities in real contexts. What's the real implementation of the new curriculum since it has been carried out for 10 years? Do the teachers always follow what the curriculum suggests? Is the grammar instruction communicative-oriented? What factors influence the teachers'choice of different grammar teaching approaches? This study is to find out the answers through the perspective of 21 student teachers who did their teaching practice in several middle schools for 5 months. It focuses on the disparity in the beliefs of these participants before and after the teaching practice shown from questionnaires and tries to dig out the reasons through in-depth interviews. Before the teaching practice, the training courses in the college impressed the student teachers a lot with communicative language teaching and they had strong beliefs towards it. However, when they began their teaching practice, many factors in teaching environment forced them to change their former beliefs and most of the changes were incongruent with the curriculum reform. These changes mainly fell on such aspects as teacher role, error correction, native language use, tasks and activities, implicit or explicit grammar teaching, material supplement. The interview data showed that exam-oriented assessment system; the difficulty of the grammar teaching material; time constraints and classroom size; students'different needs, characteristics and language proficiency level; supervising teachers'beliefs are the most common factors in influencing the student teachers'beliefs. On the other hand, far from being seen as evidence of the failure of teacher education, the changes in student teachers'beliefs may be seen as evidence of an essential process in the development of beliefs about teaching which begins prior to the student teachers'entry into formal teaching career and continues throughout their careers. It matches the process of equilibration described by Piaget (1992) in the cognitive development which is considered a fundamental factor in mental development.The investigation of such belief changes during practice teaching helped them identify the actual situation of educational innovation and helped them realize the situational influences they may face when implementing curricular innovations. Although facing many obstacles, new teachers should guide students to use grammar in various communicative activities as much as possible and it is of little use to attribute all obstacles to the external factors. New teachers have to find out ways to balance the prescribed theory and actual classroom teaching by engaging in constant self-reflection, and try to find a compromise between the exam-oriented environment and the communication-guided goals. They should be more creative and risk-taking to create unique and effective teaching styles without being restricted by their former beliefs or by the examination system.