eachers' beliefs are intertwined with their instructional practices and influence the ways they act and interact with students in the classroom (Philipp, 2007;Thompson, 1992).Researchers have found that teachers may hold a number of unproductive beliefs about English Learners (ELs), such as ELs cannot meet learning goals and their families do not highly regard education (McLeman & Fernandes, 2012;Pettit, 2011).Teachers who hold these types of unproductive beliefs may perceive teaching mathematics with ELs as a problem to overcome, thus affecting student learning.Such views, however, may ultimately encourage a perspective that devalues or fails to recognize the knowledge and skills ELs possess (see, e.g., Civil, 2007;Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992).To counter these types of beliefs, we argue that it is important to understand the context in which these beliefs are developed.Unproductive beliefs about ELs reflect wider societal views.Educational research comparing ELs to other "higher performing" student populations, who are frequently monolingual and White, continues to pervade the literature (Gutiérrez, 2008).Nonetheless, a focus on the achievement gap between students without regard to the social and political structures that contribute to these differences in achievement (Gutiérrez, 2013) upholds a subconscious narrative that the standard to which all should be held is that of monolingual, White students and that other students (at the lower end of the gap, such as ELs) need to be "fixed" in order to "catch up" with their peers.Parks (2009) cautioned: T de Araujo et al.
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Araujo et al. (2016) studied this question.