A Study of Modifications in Teachers’ Pedagogical Beliefs: Pre-Service Versus Novice Teachers

Pedagogical beliefs as an important concept in psychology are one of the most influential and decisive factors in learners’ success. Recently, teacher beliefs have attracted the attention of many researchers in English language teaching contexts; therefore, the current study investigated non-native novice English Language Teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and the extent to which their pedagogical beliefs modified in the first year of their teaching experience in comparison to pre-service teachers. The required data were collected through a belief questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. Although the results of the questionnaire demonstrated that there were statistically significant differences between pre-service and novice teachers, the findings of qualitative data illustrated that the majority of pedagogical beliefs were reformed. The findings indicated that several factors stimulated reformation in teachers’ beliefs; the overlooked importance of teachers’ role in materials development; lack of teaching practices in teacher education programs; cultural and contextual factors; and assessment procedure. Therefore, teachers need authority and power in educational contexts; teacher educators should specify a specific time to teaching practices to pre-determine the possible problems of the actual teaching practices in the classrooms; and a strong need for assessment practices in teacher education programs is required.

Keywords:

education reform , English teacher education , international teacher education , teacher beliefs , teacher education program