Experienced Teachers Of English Research Articles

CONVERGENCES AND DIVERGENCES BETWEEN AN EFL TEACHER’S BELIEFS AND CLASSROOM PRACTICES IN TEACHING SPEAKING

Revealing teachers’ beliefs about teaching in EFL speaking contexts may help better teaching practice. This research was conducted to investigate a teacher’s belief about teaching speaking focusing on convergences and discrepancies between the beliefs and the practices in the classroom. Grounded in a qualitative case study with interviews and classroom observations, an experienced English teacher with more than 10 years of teaching speaking in English participated in the study. The results of the study indicated that the teacher paid more attention to fluency and gave practical speaking tips when the students encountered communication breakdowns. Further, the teacher generally practiced her belief in the classroom, even though she encountered some discrepancies. It was due to some students’ factors including students’ language proficiency and their affective factors. Therefore, it is essential for EFL teachers to systematically and regularly monitor the relations between their beliefs and practices through reflective practices in order to improve their everyday practice of teaching speaking in particular. It is further suggested that teachers get engaged in some reflective practices to bridge their beliefs and teaching practices and find out how the reflection can benefit their beliefs and instructional decisions. 

The Employment of EFL English Teachers’ Reflective Teaching: Types and Tools for Assessing Oneself

Reflecting on the teaching and learning process has been carried out as an important way of assessing oneself to improve teachers’ competence and professionalism. During blended learning in EFL classroom context, the results of the reflective teaching should be informative for teachers to know their teaching quality as well as to understand the students’ need and expectation in their learning. Thus, various reflective teaching strategies have been employed to enhance teachers’ reflective practice. This descriptive study is aimed to analyze the reflective teaching types and the strategies employed by the EFL English teachers in reflecting on their teaching. 17 secondary experienced English teachers were involved as the participants. Questionnaire and unstructured interview guide were administered to gather the data and the results were analyzed descriptively. The findings show that the English teachers tended to do reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. They implemented various reflective teaching strategies such as students’ feedback, workshop or seminar, video recording, reflective journal writing, study-group, and class walk-through observation. Among those strategies, class walk-through observation done by the school supervisor was considered to be the least effective strategy. Portfolio, action-research, survey/questionnaire, and peer-observation were never conducted due to certain reasons. However, the discussion about the implementation of those reflective teaching strategies was limited in term of data collection in this study. Thus, several suggestions in relation to the limitation of the data findings are provided in this study.

How does Gender Affect Teacher-Student Interaction: A Case Study in China’s EFL Classes

Under the background of modern education paying more and more attention to gender equity, teacher-student interaction, as an important micro component that will affect students in the classroom, whether it will be affected by gender factors is also a topic that researchers have long discussed. This study is committed to adding new cases to the study of gender and teacher-student interaction, focusing on teacher-student interaction in EFL classrooms in primary education from Mainland of China. This study is a case study, focusing on an experienced English teacher and her six classes. Through classroom observation of 12 English classes and interviews with teachers, this study found that female students will receive less attention from teachers, while male students will be more likely to receive negative comments from teachers because of gender factors. Overall, it is suggested that gender bias in EFL classrooms and believed that gender factors would affect the formation of the teacher-student interaction model.

Peer Observation in Facilitating Teacher Professional Development: A Study of EFL Novice and Experienced Teachers Perceptions

Novice and Experienced English Teachers are inevitably confronted with a must to be a qualified and professional teacher. This is particularly relevant in Indonesia, where English teachers are graduates of English Education departments has challenged to teach not only English language, but also culture and should have preparation for their duties as English teachers. Peer observation has the potential to facilitate teachers to develop their teacher professional development, particularly those who teach EFL in navigating challenging elements of their teaching practice. For this reason, this qualitative study explored 10 participants’ perceptions of peer observation as an aid to professional growth. Data were garnered from questionnaires and in-depth interview. The findings of the study suggest that the participants’ understanding of peer observation as an opportunity for them to learn each other to improve their teaching quality and construct their professional identity. Then, the participants also talk about their experiences in doing peer observation, which Experienced Teachers (ET) are more confidence than Novice Teachers (NT). Further, both ET and NT need peer observation to negotiate issues and solve problems. Finally, peer observation enabled the participants to reflect on themselves and their respective weaknesses in teaching English for professional development as both novice and experienced teachers.

Feedback on Pronunciation: Vietnamese EFL Teachers’ Beliefs and Practice

In EFL classrooms today, teachers are facing the challenge of helping their students improve their intelligibility in international communication in English. Feedback is one of the main ways through which teachers are performing the task. However, feedback on students’ English pronunciation has not received commensurate attention in EFL contexts. Aiming to shed some light on this essential but neglected aspect of English language teaching (ETL), this study examines the beliefs and practices of ten experienced teachers of English at a non-English-major university in Vietnam. Findings derived from semi-structured interviews and classroom observations show that teachers largely shared a strong belief in the importance of feedback in learners’ pronunciation development. Teachers were found to mainly focus on instant feedback rather than delayed feedback, and on individual errors rather than collective ones. Findings also indicated that teachers’ approaches to feedback provision diverged greatly, which were confined by their varying expectations in pronunciation pedagogy, different knowledge, and beliefs regarding how to correct, what to correct, and who would benefit from error correction. On the basis of the findings, implications for classroom practices and teacher training were discussed.

Self-Efficacy, Stress and Job Satisfaction among Pre-Service, Novice and Experienced English Teachers: A Study of their Occupational Health

BackgroundThis study aimed to investigate English teachers’ self-efficacy for student engagement, classroom management, instructional strategies and literacy instruction, as well as to discover teacher stress and job satisfaction can play a role in interfering their occupational health (in terms of self-efficacy). In addition, this is one of the first studies to understand the differences in self-efficacy among pre-service, novice and experienced in-service teachers in a Chinese society, where English is positioned as a foreign language.Participants and procedure271 English teachers (90 pre-service, 181 in-service) with mean teaching experience of 5.57 months for per-service, and 98.51 months for in-service were participated in this quantitative research study, as the targets were not be able to approach randomly, the English teachers were approaching individually though referral sampling, informing that the purpose of the study and receive their consent.ResultsIt discovered both pre-service and novice in-service teachers posses lowest self-efficacy. Moreover, teachers’ stress from classroom predicted their self-efficacy for student engagement and classroom management negatively. On the other hand, teachers’ job satisfaction predicts their self-efficacy for student engagement, instructional strategies and literacy instruction positively.ConclusionsImplications (based on the findings) are discussed in order to provide insights for for schools and education departments to strengthen the teachers’ capability of teaching and their occupational health.

EVALUATION OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF TEACHERS PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT (TPD) ON RECIPROCAL TEACHING STRATEGIES

There has been outcry over the inability of new and less experienced English teachers to apply strategies that could enhance students’ reading comprehension. Reciprocal Teaching Strategy (RTS) was therefore introduced via the teacher professional development (TPD to augment teachers’ competence in reading comprehension. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of teacher professional development on reciprocal strategies among less experienced English language teachers in South East, Nigeria. The impact of reciprocal teaching has been continually established if the approach is properly carried under a guidance of an expert. Professional development has been a recognized management practice where teachers are trained to develop their professional and pedagogical skills that would effectively and efficiently enhance their teaching performance in class. Experimental research design was applied for this evaluation (pre-test-intervention-post-test approach) to determine the effectiveness of the strategy. A total of N=56 constitutes the sample size. Teacher survey questionnaire (TSQ) was the instrument for data collection. The result shows a significant improvement after the intervention. This paper therefore concludes that RTS is a good strategy to teach reading of comprehension to students. It also summarized that TDP is an effective strategy to improve the competency level of new and less experienced English teachers.

Global Coursebooks in the Course of Time: The Case of Interchange Level 2

AbstractAlthough global English Language Teaching (ELT) coursebooks have been subject to numerous (critical) analyses, the changes occurring to their contents over different editions have received scarce attention. In this study, the researchers examined the transformations over different editions of Interchange series (level 2) regarding some selected aspects of their textual contents. Seeking experienced English teachers’ views of the global coursebooks’ transformations over the past decade was another aim of the study. The analysis and comparison of the included topics and titles, characters, sites and contexts in Interchange series as well as interviews with 12 English teachers revealed that the content-based changes of different editions of this coursebook are superficial and cosmetic-like and despite the claims for globality, fallacies such as real-life-ness, representation and globality are still evident. We hope the findings of the study would aid curriculum and policy makers, institute managers, and language teachers to reconsider the functioning and value of current global ELT coursebooks.

Quality Teaching Practice: Value Education in the Language Classroom

The latest Malaysian Educational Blueprint (2013-2025) asserts the importance of producing value-driven Malaysians through education. English language teaching should be aimed beyond producing more proficient users as it possesses a nature that is particularly suitable for value incorporation. This research aims to investigate how English teachers communicate values to students, the kinds of values communicated and whether the values communicated are stipulated by the Ministry of Education. This research utilized a qualitative case study approach on two respondents, an experienced English teacher and a novice English teacher. Their lessons were videotaped, transcribed and coded based on a set of established analysis tool. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted to further understand the values depicted by the respondents. The results of the research show that teachers consciously incorporated values through selected topics, tasks and explicit moral statements. They subconsciously transmitted values through classroom rules and regulations, curricular substructures and expressive morality. It is found in this research that teachers applied much more subconscious approaches to communicate values than that of conscious ones during teacher-student encounter, with classroom facilitation being used as the medium most frequently. The kinds of values communicated included spiritual, intellectual, esthetical, positive, interactional, citizen, economical and modernized values. About half of the values communicated were stipulated by the Ministry of Education. This research provides new insights into how Malaysian English teachers can improve the quality of their teaching by harnessing the full potential of a language classroom to educate values.

FACTORS INFLUENCING AN EFL LEARNER’S PROFICIENCY: AN ENGLISH TEACHER’S PERSPECTIVE

This study investigated the factors affecting an EFL learner's success in learning English. An experienced English teacher was chosen as a model of a successful learner of English and was interviewed on how she learned English. The findings indicate that the factors contributing to her success in learning English include (1) internal motivation, (2) social context, and (3) a positive attitude towards English. The findings of this study are in line with second language learning theories. This implies that such factors as motivation, social context, and positive attitude towards target language need to be taken into account to succeed in learning English as a foreign language.

TPACK FRAMEWORK: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN EFL CLASSROOMS

Technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) is a dynamic framework for defining teachers' knowledge. This framework is needed for designing, implementing, and evaluating curriculum and instruction with technology. TPACK framework was firstly developed by Shulman (1986) and then expanded by Mishra & Koehler (2006) by adding the technology element. The purpose of this inquiry is to explore and retell the story of an English teacher using the TPACK framework for teaching English. More specifically, the study is intended to know the challenges and the opportunities in using the TPACK framework in teaching English. A narrative inquiry with the thematic analysis used for analyzing the data. To collect the data, the researcher used a semi-structured interview, observation, and document analysis. The participant was an experienced English Teacher in a high school in Indonesia. The study revealed that technology integration in teaching English is quite complicated. The teacher deals with challenges like IT literate, internet connection, and lack of ideas to create meaningful tasks using technology. Otherwise, technology integration offers some opportunities such as a pleasant and flexible classroom, motivate students and teacher to improve themselves and various opportunities to develop the multimodal product. This finding is a useful input related to the EFL research on technology integration. 

Comparison between Novice and Experienced English Teachers’ Perspectives and Teaching Strategies for Underachieving Students

Comparison between Novice and Experienced English Teachers’ Perspectives and Teaching Strategies for Underachieving Students

Teacher’s Beliefs and Practices in the Integration of Higher Order Thinking Skills in Teaching Reading

Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) is an essential skill for students to compete in this technological age. Hence, teachers need to hold strong beliefs about HOTS as it influences their classroom practices. Moreover, the study about HOTS in English language teaching has not been widely explored. This case study seeks to explore teacher’s beliefs in the integration of HOTS in teaching reading and how the beliefs are reflected in classroom practices. Further, it also investigates the factor influencing the teacher’s beliefs and practices. The participant was an experienced English teacher in a public senior high school. Data were collected using interviews, observation, and review of documents. Data then were analyzed using the Pattern Matching technique (Yin, 2018) and interactive model data analysis (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014). The results revealed that the teacher held strong beliefs about the integration of HOTS in teaching reading. These beliefs include belief about the conception of HOTS, the importance of HOTS, the role of the teacher, the strategies to promote HOTS, and the assessment of HOTS. In practice, the teacher did not fully reflect what she believes, especially about the assessment of HOTS. It also found that training, learning experience, teaching experience, institutional factor, student factor, and availability of learning support influenced teacher beliefs and practice in integrating HOTS in teaching reading. This study implies that there needs more teachers’ professional development to support the successful integration of HOTS in English language teaching.

In search of reflection-in-action: An exploratory study of the interactive reflection of four experienced teachers

Despite widespread discussion of Schön's reflection-in-action in teacher education literature, few studies have attempted to document it during interactive teaching. Those that do invariably fail to separate it from post-hoc reflection on action. This study uses triangulated video stimulated recall to investigate the interactive reflection of four experienced teachers of English as a foreign language. It provides evidence to support Schön's construct of reflection-in-action, but also documents reflective processes not mentioned by Schön. An empirically-derived eight category typology of teacher interactive thought and taxonomy of interactive reflection are proposed along with three types and six patterns of interactive reflection.

The Teacher’s Beliefs and Practices on the Use of Digital Comics in Teaching Writing: A qualitative case study

In the industrial era 4.0, the use of digital comic as a multimodal teaching medium is seen as the new trend in EFL classrooms. Although many teachers had already used this medium, so far, there was not any study which inquires the use of comic in another setting such as vocational high schools. Considering this gap, this study aimed to explore teacher belief, practice, and problems in implementing digital comics to teach writing for vocational students. This study used a qualitative case study approach. The subject was an experienced English teacher who held M. A. in English language. As the findings, the teacher believed that the implementation of comics-manga was the best method to switch the vocational students’ stereotype on English; from English as the most difficult subject to English as the enjoyable subject. This medium was implemented by using the genre approach. However, as the consequence, the combination of digital comics and process approach confronted a major challenge, namely time management.

Professional Self-Development Based on Informal Learning: A Case Study of Foreign Language Teachers in a University of China

Teachers at all stages of their careers need to engage in lifelong learning to keep abreast with the changing and challenging pedagogical environment. The purpose of the study is to find out how informal learning helps experienced English teachers teaching non-English majors in a Chinese university to keep professional development in an age of web 2.0. A survey was conducted firstly to find out the status quo and the need of foreign language teachers’ professional development followed by in-depth interviews to elicit informal learning activities from three experienced English teachers. The study points to the changes in teachers’ informal learning activities in the new era of Internet and emerging technologies, characterized by the wide use of online learning resources, online learning communities and mobile phones in addition to seeking help from colleagues. Teachers’ awareness and belief of autonomy play a crucial role in their learning to achieve professional development.

English

Teachers’ ability to reflect on their performances or reflective teaching has been commonly used and accepted in the educational contexts. However, it has not become a content item or a course in educational curricula so far. For this reason, reflective abilities of teachers or preservice teachers cannot be measured, and there is limited feedback on their reflective performances in the teaching and learning process. The purpose of this study is to provide evidence of reflection and reflective skills of preservice teachers of English (PTE) along with experienced teachers of English (ETE) by measuring the use of reflection in different settings such as classroom settings, colleagues and management settings. Reflection-oriented reactions of ETE and PTE to possible complexities or problematic situations were scored by using Teacher Reflection Scale to reveal if they are reflective practitioners or not. The data were collected from 298 volunteer PTE and 293 ETE. Statistical analyses give evidence that ETE participants reflect more than PTE participants. Among PTE, participants mostly reflect in classroom and colleagues’ settings, but not in management settings. Besides, ETE participants also reflect in classroom settings, but not in collegial setting. They prefer to reflect within management setting. Compared to PTE, there is evidence that more ETE in teaching and learning environments reflect on their practices.   Key words: Reflection, teaching, teacher development, assessment.

‘Buying in’ to communicative language teaching: the impact of ‘initial’ certification courses on the classroom practices of experienced teachers of English

ABSTRACTThis study reports on the impact of an ‘initial’ certification course (ICC) for English language teachers (the Cambridge CELTA) on the self-reported classroom practices and related beliefs of experienced teacher-participants. Although many participants on such courses are experienced non-native speaker teachers of English (NNESTs), almost nothing is known about the impact of ICCs on their classroom practices. Qualitative data, including questionnaire and interview data, was collected from 29 experienced Egyptian teachers of English 6 months after course completion to understand what changes had occurred in their self-reported classroom practices, their beliefs, and what challenges they had faced interpreting what they had learnt for their own teaching contexts. The data reveals a commitment on the part of most participants to implement the practices imparted on the course, indicating a noticeable shift in beliefs about how languages are learnt and taught towards more communicative, learner-centred practices. It also reveals increases in self-confidence from some participants, both regarding classroom practices and personal status as internationally certified teachers. However, significant variation in self-reported implementation was also found depending on contexts, constraints and challenges, indicating strongly that the communicative practices promoted on ‘international’ ICCs need adaptation in order for them to work effectively in primary, secondary, tertiary and adult classrooms in the Middle East. Recommendations provided include more discussion, both in inputs and assignments, of issues of how course participants will appropriate what they have learnt on the course for their own classrooms, and the provision of opportunities for peer-support, possibly online, after course completion.

The Affordances of Mobile-App Supported Teacher Observations for Peer Feedback

Mobile technologies offer new affordances for teacher observation in teacher education programs, albeit under-examined in contrast to video technologies. The purpose of this article is to investigate the integration of mobile technologies into teacher observation. Using a case study method, the authors compare the traditional narrative paper-pen, mobile app-supported, and video observation methods. Participants included 2 experienced teachers of English as a Foreign Language who were selected as the observers and observees in a higher education institutional context. The data was collected in three different teaching sessions over 4 weeks. Data sources included lesson observation notes and semi structured interviews conducted with teachers after each session. Results suggest recommendations for the integration of mobile and video based observation tools into teacher professional development programs, pre-service and in-service teacher education programs, as well as teacher certificate programs.

DEVELOPING BEGINNER TEACHERS’ PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLS IN POST-LESSON REFLECTIONS

Although reflective practice has gained popularity world-wide in recent years, some argue that the ‘reflective’ research has focused too much on different conceptualisations of reflection and not enough on how teachers actually think when they reflect. This article addresses this issue of teacher cognition by examining one skill underpinning reflective thinking, problem solving. Specifically, this study compares the problem solving of six inexperienced and three experienced teachers of English. It emerged that the experienced teachers developed sophisticated reasoning skills to help themselves analyse problems in principled ways. This article identifies what principled reasoning actually consists of and how it may be developed in inexperienced teachers of English to help them solve teaching problems and so reflect more effectively.