Abstract
There has been much research into teacher beliefs about teaching and learning as seen in the general teacher education literature. In the field of language teacher education, this line of research has been evolving, with the recent trend being streamlined into “teacher cognition” as a generic or umbrella term. Despite increasing amounts of research output so far, research into foreign language teachers’ cognitions about their own teaching and decision-making is still insufficient, particularly with regard to university-level English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) teachers in China. Drawing on Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory, this qualitative research focused on EFL teachers’ cognitions about form-focused instruction in Chinese university settings. It intended to discover how teachers’ cognitions changed when they were expected to teach in actual classrooms and what factors contributed to these changes. Data collected from four teacher-participants through semi-structured interviews, classroom observations and follow-up stimulated recall interviews showed participants’ support for focus-on-form instruction, which means they not only paid attention to the grammatical form of the language but also to the meaning it is intended to convey. However, data also showed that the teacher-participants shifted from focus-on-form to focus-on-formS instruction in actual teaching, which suggests that they might have realized the challenges of carrying out teaching activities surrounding focus-on-form and would like to take an easier approach by only teaching the grammar of the language by focusing on formS. Such incongruences are interpreted with reference to a plethora of sociocultural factors including traditional Chinese thinking and institutional expectations. The implications of the findings for stakeholders in universities, including faculty members, students, and curriculum developers in similar contexts, are also discussed.
Highlights
There has been a renewed interest in the study of language teacher cognition in the past three decades
Framed in Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory, this paper explored Chinese university EFL teachers’ cognitions about form-focused instruction in university classrooms
As stated in the literature review part, if participants’ professed beliefs and their actual classroom instruction about vocabulary teaching and grammar teaching were undertaken in meaning-based activities like pair work, group work or other contextualized activities, we considered it as focus-on-form instruction; if participants only explained grammar rules or meanings of new words or phrases and asked students to drill them in a way like filling in the blank and translation instead of asking them to practise new knowledge in meaning-based activities, we classified them as focus-on-formS instruction
Summary
There has been a renewed interest in the study of language teacher cognition in the past three decades (see Lee, 2009; Mak, 2011; Borg, 2015; Li, 2017; Gao and Zhang, 2020; Li, 2020). Most of them were conducted from a cognitive perspective (Barcelos, 2003(for syntheses and meta-reviews, see Borg, 2015, 2019; Sun and Zhang, 2019; Li, 2020; see Bao et al, 2016). Such studies are characterized by viewing teachers’ cognitions as a static, internal representation of experience that is resistant to change, and most often data were collected through questionnaires (Dufva, 2003; Sun and Zhang, 2019). As is well argued in Li (2020), there is a need for research into language teachers’ cognitions to shift its theoretical lens from a cognitive to a sociocultural perspective (Burns et al, 2015; Kubanyiova and Feryok, 2015; Sun and Zhang, 2019)
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