A Case Study Of Senior High School English Teachers’ Beliefs And Practice Of Implementing Ideological-political Education

Implementing the “ideological-political education in all courses” belief(the IPEAC belief)is a major trend in education reform in recent years.Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to study on the IPEAC belief and practice of senior high school English teachers.Meanwhile,teachers’ beliefs greatly influence on teaching practice.By studying the relationship between teachers’ IPEAC beliefs and practices,this research reveals the problems and difficulties of this education reform in daily English teaching and provides referential experience for the construction of the IPEAC system.To achieve it,this research conducts a case study of three senior high school English teachers,adopting Teacher Cognition theory as the theoretical basis to look into the relationship between teachers’ espoused IPEAC beliefs and their actual teaching practice,and then makes systematic theoretical attribution of the inconsistencies lie in their beliefs and practices.This research addresses the following questions:(1)What beliefs do the teachers hold about implementing the IPEAC belief?(2)How are the teachers’ IPEAC beliefs reflected in their classroom practice? And what is the relationship between the teachers’ stated belief and their classroom practice?(3)What are the potential causes behind that relationship?To address these questions,this study adopts a qualitative method to collect data through classroom observations,interviews,and documentary analysis.The researcher first conducted pre-lesson interviews to collect three teachers’ understanding of the notion of the IPEAC belief and their ideal approaches to implement it,followed by a two-week classroom observation in which three lessons per teacher were collected and classroom excerpts were analyzed.Then,the researcher selected one of the three lessons to conduct post-lesson interviews with the three teacher participants,which included discussions on the design and practice of the IPEAC practice in the lesson,as well as the difficulties they encountered and the help they needed in their IPEAC practice.Finally,by comparing the observed teachers’ IPEAC beliefs and practices,this research concludes that the inconsistencies between their beliefs and practices are more prevailing,and in the vast majority of cases,the actual teaching practice does not reach the their stated ideal IPEAC approaches.The potential causes are traced back in four dimensions:(1)social contextual factors,including the exam pressure,the power abuse in classroom discourse,the not-yet mature IPEAC system and insufficient teacher education;(2)classroom contextual factors,including teacher-dominant classroom objectives,neglection of individual varieties,the lack of authenticity in classroom interactions and the highly generative characteristics of class teaching;(3)student factors,including students’ language proficiency,learning habits and preferences,and student variety;(4)teacher factors,including the mixed nature of teachers’ beliefs and the lack of experience in the IPEAC practice.To address the identified issues,this research argues that future teacher education needs to help teachers clarify the concept of the IPEAC belief,effectively bond the IPEAC belief with the deep-rooted exam-orientation and individualized teacher beliefs,and develop actionable approaches of implementing this belief.Future research could shift the focus to the student side,for example,by studying student feedback on teachers’ IPEAC practices and by establishing an available IPEAC assessment system to help teachers evaluate students’ values growth in order to ensure the effectiveness and developability of teachers’ IPEAC practice.In addition,Teacher Agency and Critical Discourse Analysis are also notable theoretical supplements to this research topic.