Investigating the influence of contextual factors on English language teachers? beliefs

This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between contextual factors and English language beliefs. In this sense, the contextual factor which is mostly related with English language teachers? beliefs and practices was analyzed and the existence of a meaningful difference between public and private school English teachers in terms of perceived impact of contextual factors was examined. A scale was searched in relevant literature for this purpose and the questionnaire, which was developed by Lumpe, Haney and Czerniak (1999) for the purpose of investigating the effect of contextual factors on science teachers? beliefs, was used by changing its content completely. The questionnaire items were constituted by having pre-interviews with English teachers and reviewing relevant literature. The new scale developed was piloted with 82 public and private school English teachers working in different parts of Turkey and the collected data were subject to reliability analysis with SPSS. The actual study was conducted with the participation of 210 public and private school English teachers working in different parts of Turkey. Most of the data were collected online using social networking sites and English teaching forums. As a result of the reliability analysis, the scale appeared to be highly reliable and six contextual factors were obtained, namely policy, classroom, inspection, student, management, teacher oriented contextual factors. In order to analyse the reliability of the questionnaire data, interviews were conducted with 14 participants lasting roughly half an hour and the collected data were compared with the questionnaire data. As a result of the regression analysis conducted with SPSS, a significant relationship was observed between contextual factors and English language teachers? beliefs and practices. With regard to correlation analysis, it was found out that student oriented contextual factors have the greatest impact on English language teachers. On the basis of independent samples t-test results, except teacher and management oriented contextual factors, meaningful difference was observed between public school and private school English teachers in terms of policy, classroom, inspection, and student oriented contextual factors.