An Ethnographic Study on Beliefs and Attitudes of Some Larkana Teachers of English

Many specialists agree that beliefs have a powerful impact on teachers’ practices. However, it should be taken into account that their attitudes affect their practices as well. This paper is about English language teachers´ attitudes and beliefs. The objective was to share some data from ethnographic research developed with a group of high school English teachers from Larkana. The research data endorsed our hypothesis of the existence of a relationship between belief and attitude, which, to us, until then, was a gap in the studies of Applied Linguistics. Although initially, we had in mind the idea that attitudes could generate beliefs, we verified that attitudes are part of beliefs as well as they are personal, contextual, and incidental, which we explain in this paper. The data were collected through an interview and a questionnaire, which made it possible, based on the teachers' statements, to figure out how beliefs and attitudes operate and converge. That is why a study such as this is relevant since it can contribute to the field so that teachers can understand even better their pedagogical settings.