The Effects of Contextual Factors on Teacher's Beliefs and Practices
Abstract Although teachers’ beliefs and teaching context are important factors in recent language teaching research, there is very little studies on the effects of contextual factors. To fill this gap, this study used explanatory sequential design to investigate the effects of contextual factors on teachers’ beliefs and practices. It measured the teachers’ beliefs about language teaching context, teaching and learning of 30 teachers by administrating a self developed questionnaire and comparing the questionnaires to their teaching collected through class observations. The yielded results revealed that the contextual factors of teaching do not highly affect teachers’ beliefs on language teaching. Additionally, the analysis shows that teacher performance is different regarding applying syllabus and methodology in adult and young adult departments. Moreover, no significant difference was found between teachers’ beliefs in two departments.
In Section 1 several scenarios were selected that were based on instrumentally observed historical climatic data (HIST) and on results from a general circulation model (GISS). In this section we employ indices or models to analyze the impacts associated with these scenarios on the thermal climate (growing degree days), the moisture climate (precipitation effectiveness), the combined thermal-moisture effects (climatic index of agricultural potential which reflects biomass potential), and on drought frequency.