INTERPLAY BETWEEN TEACHERS’ BELIEFS AND THEIR PRACTICES: A STUDY OF THE GOVT. ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHERS IN KHYBER PAKHTUNKHWA, PAKISTAN
Keywords:
English language teachers, Secondary education, Govt. sector, Teachers’ beliefs, Teachers’ practicesAbstract
This study aims to explore the relationship between English language teachers’ beliefs and their actual classroom practices about teaching of Englishin the government secondary schools of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan.The study undertakes the null hypothesis: “There is no relationship between Govt. English language teachers’ beliefs and their practices about teaching of English at secondary level in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.”English language teachers who teach English as a subject to secondary classes in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, constituted the population of the study. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is a large province with 25 districts (at the time of the study) and it was not easy to collect data from each district therefore, the province as a whole, was divided into three main regions; the Northern, the Central and the Southern and one district was chosen for the collection of data from the aforementioned regions. In total, data was collected from 120 Govt. secondary teachers (male) 40 each from one district, by employing multi-stage cluster stratified sampling technique. Questionnaire was used as the only tool for data collection. The data was interpreted through Gamma coefficient correlation. The results show that although teachers had strong beliefs about teaching of English; yet, their beliefs often did not correspond to their actual classroom practices.
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