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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Teachers’ beliefs
The term beliefs are usually considered as a part of faith: individuals’perception and understanding of the world, which can guide one’s behaviors.Beliefs are neither easily defined nor studied (Johnson, 1994; Pajares, 1992),that’s why beliefs have been concerned as “messy” construct (Pajares, 1992). Studieson beliefs in varied areas have resulted in a variety of meanings. In pedagogy, beliefsare one of the essential points to deal with teachers’ behaviors in practice.All teachers hold beliefs about their work, subject, learning, students and theirrole. A number of educational beliefs have appeared in the literature (Pajares, 1992;Nian, 2002). Current definitions of teachers’ beliefs focus primarily on how teachersthink about the nature of foreign languages, teaching and learning (Tercanlioglu,2001). For Clark and Peterson (1986), teachers’ beliefs can be perceived as “the richstore of knowledge that teachers have affecting their planning and their interactivethoughts and decisions” (Cited from, henceforth cf. Nian, 2002: 5).Kagan (1992: 65) defined teachers’ beliefs as “a particularly provocative form ofpersonal knowledge that is generally defined as pre-service or in-service teachers'implicit assumptions about students, learning, classrooms, and the subject matter to betaught.” He stated what teachers knew or believed about their occupation was implicit.
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2.2 Constructivism in Education
As a philosophy of learning, constructivism can be traced to 1980s, whichemerged on the base of criticizing and reflecting the theory of behaviorism. It is afurther development from behaviorism to cognitivism, which has a great impact onclassroom instruction and curriculum design.Constructivism was championed by Jean Piaget. In contrast to traditional viewsabout language learning, Piaget described learning process as students formed theirown knowledge schemes in relation to and filtered through their previous and currentexperiences (see Yang, 2006). Piaget was very interested in how people came to knowthings from infancy to adulthood. He found that people knew things through theirpersonal experiences, and they had different interpretation of those experiences atdifferent stages of life (see William & Burden, 2006). Piaget also held that individualsconstructed their knowledge about the external world gradually via interaction withthe surrounding environment, resulting in the development of its cognitive structure.In the classroom, the role of teacher is to encourage and help learners in this process.Piaget focused on individual’s development, and ignored the significance of socialenvironment in their learning process (see William & Burden, 2006).
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Chapter Three Research Methodology ........19
3.1 Research aims and questions .....19
3.2 Participants....19
3.3 Research Instruments.....20
3.4 Data Collection ....22
3.5 Data Analysis .......23
Chapter Four Results and Discussion ....24
4.1 The overall pattern of pre-service EFL teachers’ beliefs.........24
4.2 Beliefs’ differences between the junior students and the senior students 37
4.3 Beliefs’ differences between the normal university students........44
4.4 Summary........45
Chapter Five Conclusion and Implications .......46
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