Teachers’ Beliefs, Perceived Practice and Actual Classroom Practice in Relation to Traditional (Teacher-Centered) and Constructivist (Learner-Centered) Teaching (Note 1)

Abstract

This study explored the EFL teachers’ beliefs, perceived practice and actual classroom practice in relation to Traditional (teacher-centered) and Constructivist (learner-centered) teaching in Cyprus Turkish State Secondary Schools context. For this purpose, semi-structured interviews and structured observations were employed with purposively selected participants to gain in-depth understanding about the teachers’ beliefs, their perceived practice and actual classroom practice. The teachers were interviewed to elicit their subjective views about their beliefs and perceived practice regarding the themes, teacher-centered and learner-centered teaching in the context of their instructional practice. The observations were carried some time after the interviews had been completed. The teachers were observed for the purpose of exploring to what extent their beliefs were reflected in their classroom practice. COLT (Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching) Observation Scheme was utilized as the data collection instrument. 10 EFL teachers were purposively selected by criterion sampling as the participants of the investigation. An equal number of experienced male and female teachers who were similar in terms of length of experience were selected for the in-depth interviews and observations on voluntary basis. Findings of the study revealed that regarding teacher-centered and learner-centered teaching, teachers showed some variations in their stated beliefs. The interview data indicated that although the teachers expressed their beliefs in Constructivist learning and teaching, and both Constructivist and Traditional, their perceived practice was Traditional (except one teacher for whom it was both). However, the findings based on the observational data showed that Traditional practice was more frequent than communicative potentially Constructivist practice.