Questions as beliefs: investigating teachers’ beliefs in reading through inquiry questions

Abstract

Much has been written about teachers’ beliefs, including their beliefs about reading. Due to its established impact on how it affects classroom practices, teachers’ beliefs as a psychological construct is considered by some researchers as the most important in relation to teaching and teaching education. Thus, increasingly teachers of reading have been encouraged to reflect on their teaching practices as well as beliefs about reading. However, less work has been done on investigating reading teachers’ beliefs through the lens of the questions they ask about reading itself. This paper argues that questions are constitutive of people’s beliefs about what they deem important in life or in professional practice, and are regulative acts and evidence of reflection. Thus, analysing inquiry questions or what teachers ask about reading will enable identification and description of certain beliefs held by the teachers themselves. In other words, framed within an understanding of teachers’ questions as teachers’ beliefs, through thematic analysis this paper presents six themes that reveal teachers’ beliefs related to reading instruction.

Keywords

• Teachers’ beliefs
• teaching reading
• literacy beliefs