Teacher Belief in a Focus Group: A Respecification Study

Abstract

This paper investigates teacher belief as a social practice in a focus group setting with three second language teachers by utilizing a discursive psychology (DP) approach (Edwards, 1997; Edwards & Potter, 2005). By adopting an empirically based emic perspective (i.e., how the participants display their understandings through their own contributions), we aim to respecify individual psychological states as an embodied interactional activity and study what members achieve through their interaction, particularly in their disagreement and teasing sequences. The findings show how teacher belief is a socially co-constructed phenomenon that not only evolves through interaction but stands as a foundational concept upon which participants build and display their teacher competence within the focus group setting. We thereby provide a new methodological means of investigation and new methods to focus on when examining teacher belief, as well as to show the procedure of what members do in a teacher belief focus group session. We conclude by summarizing our findings and addressing some implications for further work on teacher belief.