A Study Of Senior High School English Teachers’ Beliefs In The Context Of Curriculum Reform

Since the 1980 s, the teachers’ beliefs have attracted a great number of researchers’ attention around all over the world. In China, the experts in the education began to examine the teachers’ beliefs from the 1990 s. After the implementation of the new curriculum reform, the research on teachers’ beliefs increased especially in recent years. It has been acknowledged that teachers’ beliefs have a great impact on teachers’ attitudes, behaviors, and decision-makings in their teaching process. Teachers’ beliefs affect the effect of the teaching practice to some extent. As the direct agents of the curriculum reform, the teachers have attracted unprecedented attention.There have been a series of researches on teachers’ beliefs; however, the majority of the subjects are college teachers. The senior high school English teachers’ beliefs haven’t received enough concern. From this aspect, it’s valuable to conduct this research for the basic English education and the new curriculum reform in China.This investigation applies a mixed-method which includes qualitative and quantitative methods. The qualitative data is collected from the interview while the quantitative data is collected through the questionnaire. 201 senior high school English teachers from Hebei Province participate in the questionnaire investigation and ten of them take part in the interview.The results of the study show that the senior high school English teachers’ beliefs are constructivist-oriented. Though there’re no significant distinctions among the teachers’ beliefs in terms of school type, gender, age, teaching experience and education background from the results of the questionnaire, by means of interview, it’s found that the teachers from key schools have more convenient conditions or teaching resources to implement the curriculum reform concepts while the teachers from ordinary schools have more obstacles to put their updated beliefs into practice. The female teachers’ beliefs are more constructivist-oriented than the male teachers. The teachers who are in their thirties and forties have more constructivist-oriented beliefs. The teachers who have taught for six to ten years are the most constructivist-oriented. The teachers with Master’s degree have more constructivist-oriented beliefs than the teachers with Bachelor’s degree. There are many factors influencing the senior high school English teachers’ beliefs including the curriculum reform, the teachers’ age, school type, teaching experience, and the interaction of the mentioned factors.Based on the findings of the research, some implications are offered to both the senior high school English teachers and the education administrators. For the teachers, they should update their knowledge about English language teaching to catch up with the educational development and put the new ideas into teaching practice through which internalize the values of the new concepts. For the education administers, they should pay more attention to the senior high school English teachers’ beliefs and make efforts to facilitate the teachers’ beliefs. Especially, they should lead and help the teachers to integrate their beliefs into teaching practice. In addition, some suggestions are also provided for the future study.