A Study of Secondary School EFL Teachers’ Pedagogical Beliefs and Classroom Practices
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Date
2012-07
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
In order to understand the reality of the classroom and improve the teaching process,
researching into teachers’ beliefs about their professional activities has been acknowledged in
mainstream education in general and in language education in particular (Borg, 2006).
This study investigated secondary school EFL teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and classroom
practices. It specifically examined the instructional practices the teachers conducted in
classrooms and the beliefs they hold about English teaching profession, English teaching and
learning, and the contextual factors. The study used questionnaire, classroom observation,
interviews of pre and post classroom observation, and lesson plan analysis for data collection.
The findings revealed the teachers’ unrealistic interest and competence in their English
teaching profession. That is, the teachers seemed to think that they were merely interested in
English teaching profession and were competent for conducting classroom instructions
effectively though the classroom observation data failed to confirm such professional interest
and competence. The result also indicated the teachers’ shallow theoretical and practical
conceptions of the communicative language teaching. In other words, the teachers did not
seem to have clear ideas about the focus of the instruction, the roles of teachers and students,
the nature of teaching materials, the type of classroom organization and management in
employing communicative language teaching in their classrooms. Thus, the teachers’
classroom instructions revealed routine pattern of procedures (presentation, monitoring and
discussion) that did not seem to reflect their mere pedagogical conception, communicative
language teaching. Moreover, the teachers’ considered students’ limited language capacity
and interest in learning the language as the major contextual factor affecting the teaching and
learning process. Thus, it is recommended that the teachers need to have more theoretical and
practical exposure of the English teaching profession and CLT mainly through reflective
teaching and action research.
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Keywords
Pedagogical Beliefs