Tensions and Relations: Exploring the Dynamic Relationship Between Teachers’ EFL (English as a Foreign Language) Teaching and Learning Beliefs and Practices

Abstract

As a major area of enquiry in language teaching, the study of language teachers’ beliefs has focused on the exploration of its relationship with teachers’ classroom practice since the 1990s. However, the dichotomy of consistency and inconsistency between teachers’ beliefs and practice presented by the majority of prior studies in this field seems to simplify the issue in that it fails to indicate the evolving feature of the interactions between teacher beliefs and practice in different teaching contexts. By adopting socio-cultural theory, the study explores how the relationship between the teachers’ beliefs and practice is constructed. A case study was adopted to explore five secondary school EFL teachers in the context of curriculum reform in China. Semi-structured interviews, classroom observation and stimulated recall interviews were used to elicit data. The study revealed that the teachers held five major tensions, which may be resulted from the misinterpretation of the new concepts, or the incompatibility between the teachers’ existing beliefs and the new concepts from the NECS. The teachers’ explicit awareness of these tensions exerted direct influences on their practices. Moreover, the dynamic relationship between the teachers’ beliefs and practice surfaced the analysis of the tensions exemplified in the practice. That is, usually more than one belief underpinning the teachers’ practice interacts with each other, which contributes to the dynamics between the teachers’ beliefs.

This paper is part of the author’s research project ‘Study on the development of EFL teachers’ beliefs in rural secondary schools in Sichuan province in the context of the National Curriculum Reform in China’ (Num. TER2011-002), which is funded by Center for Teacher Education Research at Sichuan Province, Sichuan Philosophy and Social Science Key Research Base.