A Survey On English Teachers' Beliefs And Teachers' Behaviors On Vocabulary Teaching In Junior High School

Learners gain words through classroom learning,and students' learning is directly relevant to teachers' teaching.Moreover,teachers' teaching is determined by their beliefs.This study investigates the vocabulary teaching beliefs held by junior high school English teachers from three different junior high schools in Nanning and their practices,in the hope of arousing teachers' awareness of vocabulary teaching and promoting the practical lexis teaching.A mixed approach with questionnaires and interview was adopted to investigate the overall situations of junior high English teachers' beliefs and practices about vocabulary teaching.The dimensions of vocabulary teaching beliefs are vocabulary teaching content,teaching sequence,vocabulary presentation,vocabulary strategies,and vocabulary testing.Based on former' studies,the author made some adjustments according to vocabulary teaching procedure.The content of the questionnaire on teachers' behaviors is by the teachers' beliefs questionnaires but differ in expressions.The internal reliability of the questionnaire on teachers' beliefs is 0.866,and teachers' behaviors is 0.908.The study addresses three questions: 1)What is the overall situation of teachers' beliefs about English vocabulary teaching of junior high schools in Nanning? What causes this phenomenon? 2)What is the overall practice of teachers' behaviors about English vocabulary teaching? What causes this phenomenon? 3)What is the relationship between them and what are the influencing factors?The results indicate that 1)Teachers' vocabulary teaching beliefs are at a relatively high level.The majority of teachers have positively perceived and better-understood vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary pedagogy,as well assessment very well,namely they had a positive attitude towards most of the vocabulary beliefs.Apart from teaching sequence,teaching content of forms,structures,grammar,meanings and use of vocabulary knowledge,different presentation,and learning strategies as well vocabulary tests receive most teachers' agreements.Influenced by curriculum standard and their teaching and learning experiences,they had a deep understanding of vocabulary knowledge.2)Overall,vocabulary teaching behavior is at a relatively high level.Although it tends to be frequent,it does not reach a high level of frequency.Among them,the high frequent teaching behavior is vocabulary presentation,followed by a vocabulary test,and the lowest is vocabulary strategy.Due to teachers' inherent teaching experiences and teaching model,the frequency of vocabulary behavior is lower than the belief they held.3)vocabulary beliefs and behaviors are relatively consistent on the whole.Specifically,vocabulary presentation shows high consistency,followed by vocabulary content and vocabulary test.After the measurement of the paired-samples T-test,a certain extent of differences exists between each dimension in the two questionnaires.Beliefs have gained a higher degree of agreement,while their corresponding behaviors are in a lower frequency.Based on the interview,students themselves,time-limitation,and examination pressure contribute to the inconsistency between beliefs and practices.Based on the findings,the author proposes some suggestions from the aspects of teachers,textbook editing,test orientation,schools,as well as students,and discusses the limitations and future research directions at the end.