The Nature of Belief

Teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about L2 acquisition received much attention in the literature and, more recently, they have resurfaced as key to understanding what motivates teachers’ actions. Teachers are highly influenced by their beliefs, which in turn are closely related to their values, to their views of the world, to their conceptions of their place within it. In Altan ’s study, teachers in this study hold a variety of beliefs about language learning, some of which may constitute an impediment to successful language learning and teaching, such as some of their beliefs about pronunciation, error correction, and the time required to become proficient in a foreign language. 7 In addition, according to Ganjabi research, he found that the teachers also put strong emphasis on the communicative activities and the timing of error correction 8 . In contrast, the students tended to agree or vary their opinions of these issues. The students preferred focusing primarily on the grammatical items which caused by less appropriate idea about the value of communication and communicative activities. These findings support the general contention that language teachers may hold certain beliefs about language learning that may have an impact on their instructional practices. Furthermore, according to Kern, the different beliefs between students and teachers and found that over the period of a 15-week program, the mismatches between student and teacher beliefs still found. 9 He found stability of student beliefs at the global level when analysing beliefs of all the students and all the teachers as a single group. He explained that the persisting mismatches might be resulted from factors other than teacher beliefs such as teachers’ actual classroom practice, the nature of instructional activities, students’ assessment of their own progress, students’ expectations of achievement, students’ awareness of mistakes, textbooks, tests, and written exercises, teachers’ individual differences such as personalities, personal 7 Ibid, pp. 481-493. 8 Mahyar Ganjabi, Effective Foreign Language Teaching: a Matter of Iranian Students’ and Teachers’ Beliefs, English Language Teaching Journal, 2011, p.50 9 R.G. Kern, Students’ and teachers’ beliefs about language learning. Foreign Language Annals , 281, 2000, pp. 71-92. styles, and level of experience. He suggested that beliefs about language learning may not be easily influenced by teacher beliefs or that teacher beliefs did not influence their classroom practices. On the other hand, According to Richards, “A primary source of teachers’ classroom practices is belief systems—the information, attitudes, values, expectations, theories, and assumptions about teaching and learning that teachers build up over time and bring with them to the classroom”. 10 Richards and Lockhart further elaborated that teachers’ beliefs influence how they make decisions or act in a classroom. 11 In addition, according to Liao and Chiang’s study, emphasizing that both English learners and teachers have certain beliefs about how to learn English and these learning beliefs are often based on their previous learning experiences and cultural backgrounds, and will further influence strategies these people use to enhance their English learning and teaching, conducted a study on a total of 143 students and 15 teachers. It turned out that the two groups yielded rather consistent results on learning beliefs, although some differences between the learners’ and their teachers’ beliefs were also found. 12 In conclusion, these studies suggest that second and foreign language teachers possess certain beliefs about second language learning and second language teaching which may influence their instructional practices. However, teachers’ beliefs system seems to be complicated and consists of several constructs. Some beliefs may conflict with others or may not be as inf luential as others, and thus may not show their effects on teachers’ instructional practices. The findings about the effect of beliefs originating from formal learning experience over beliefs originating from the other sources, found in Johnson, is evidence of this argument. 10 J.C. Richards, Beyond Training, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 66 11 J.C. Richards C. Lockhart, Reflective Teaching in Second Language Classrooms, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007 12 P.S. Liao and Chiang, M.Y., The study of students’ and their teachers’ belief about English learning. Proceedings of 2003 International Conference on English Teaching and Learning in the Republic of China.