ABSTRACT
As we have already suggested, studies of teacher beliefs (e.g. Munby, 1984; Nespor, 1987; Richardson, 1994) suggest that the extent to which teachers adopt new instructional practices in their classrooms relates closely to the degree of alignment between their personal beliefs and the assumptions underlying particular teaching approaches. This suggests that, in order to understand teachers' classroom practices and to design professional development programmes that seek to change these, an understanding of teachers' beliefs is important. Nevertheless, the existing literature on teaching is weak in terms of evidence about the ways beliefs link to practice, especially in the teaching of literacy. We deliberately set out to investigate this link, and our working hypothesis was that the effective teachers of literacy would have developed a coherent set of beliefs about the nature and the learning of literacy that played a guiding role in their selection of teaching approaches. Thus our line of enquiry focused on the consistency between teachers' beliefs about literacy teaching, the teaching activities they said they valued and those activities that they actually used.
