A Comparative Study Of Language Teaching Beliefs Between Pre-service Teachers With And Without Volunteer Teaching Experience

As an implicit and complex concept,teachers’ belief has been widely concerned by researchers since the rise of teacher psychology.In the last 30 years,many researchers have carried out a large number of studies on various aspects of teachers’ beliefs.As one of its components,language teaching belief is also worthy of attention.It includes teachers’views on classroom center,teaching methods and teaching objectives.Language teaching beliefs are dynamic,they will change with teachers’ practice.As a major part of pre-service teachers,English normal college students will form the backbone of the future teaching team.In addition to participating in the education practice organized by the school in the last school year,they will also sign up for volunteer teaching during the holidays.Volunteer teaching,as their early educational practice experience,has an important impact on their teaching beliefs.However,in the current research,researchers mainly focus on the teachers’ beliefs of college English teachers and in-service teachers,and pay less attention to volunteer teaching.Based on this situation,this study attempts to explore whether volunteer teaching has an impact on pre-service teachers’ views on language teaching through a comparative study,and tries to explore the factors that cause these influences.The aim is to provide suggestions for English normal university students to form a scientific belief in language teaching before they become novice teachers and to improve the volunteer teaching project.This study puts forward three specific research questions around the research purpose:(1)What language teaching beliefs do pre-service teachers hold?(2)Are there any differences in language teaching beliefs between pre-service teachers with and without volunteer teaching experience?(3)What factors contribute to the differences?To answer these three questions,this study takes the undergraduate students who will graduate from a key normal university in June in 2021 as the subjects,and collects data by means of questionnaire and interview.In the end,152 normal English students filled in the questionnaire,and the quantitative data obtained were analyzed by SPSS software.In order to further explore the factors contributing to the difference in teaching beliefs,the researcher used the interview method to understand the influence of volunteer teaching on English normal university students.The results show that pre-service teachers generally agree with student-centered and teaching for rules,and hold a neutral attitude to Grammar-Translation Method,Audio-Lingual Method and teaching for skills.There are some differences between pre-service teachers with or without volunteer teaching experience,which is mainly reflected in their beliefs in Communicative Method and teaching for communicative functions.The agreement degree of pre-service teachers with volunteer teaching experience on related projects is higher than that of pre-service teachers without volunteer teaching experience.The reasons for these differences mainly come from two aspects:the lack of teaching resources in volunteer teaching areas and volunteer teaching experience itself.According to the findings,this paper finally puts forward some suggestions for the formation of scientific language teaching beliefs of English normal university students before they are in service.English normal university students should acquire extensive knowledge of teaching methods to ensure their professional development.They need more reflection,especially for the writing of reflection journals,which is beneficial for the repeated revision and rapid growth of their own teaching.