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This article examines the conceptions of research held by 505 teachers of English from 13 countries around the world. Questionnaire responses supplemented by follow-up written and interview data were analyzed to understand teachers' views on what research is and how often they read and do it (and why or why not in each case). An understanding of these issues is central to the development of informed policies for promoting teacher research engagement, but relevant systematic evidence is lacking in the field of English language teaching (ELT). The study shows that the teachers held conceptions of research aligned with conventional scientific notions of inquiry. The teachers also reported moderate to low levels of reading and doing research, with a lack of time, knowledge, and access to material emerging as key factors which teachers felt limited their ability to be research-engaged. Teachers engaged in research reported being driven largely by practical and professional concerns rather than external drivers such as employers or promotion. Overall, the findings of this study point to a number of attitudinal, conceptual, procedural, and institutional barriers to teacher research engagement. Understanding these, it is argued here, is an essential part of the broader process of trying to address them and hence to make teacher research engagement a more feasible activity in ELT.

This study examines tensions in the grammar teaching beliefs and practices of three practising teachers of English working in Turkey. The teachers were observed and interviewed over a period of 18 months; the observations provided insights into how they taught grammar, while the interviews explored the beliefs underpinning the teachers' classroom practices. Drawing on the distinction between core and peripheral beliefs, the analysis indicated that, while at one level teachers' practices in teaching grammar were at odds with specific beliefs about language learning, at another level, these same practices were consistent with a more generic set of beliefs about learning. The latter, it is hypothesized, constituted the teachers' core beliefs and it was these, rather than the more peripheral beliefs about language learning, that were most influential in shaping teachers' instructional decisions. It is argued that attention to the relative influence of core and peripheral beliefs on teachers' practices allows for more complex understandings of tensions in teachers' work. Claims are also made here for the benefits of grounding the study of tensions between stated beliefs and classroom behaviours in the qualitative analyses of teachers' actual classroom practices. Some implications of this study for language teacher education are also discussed.

This paper aims to extend our understanding of what it means to be a language teacher by examining ways in which language teachers are seen to be different to teachers of other subjects. Language teachers’ distinctiveness was defined by over 200 practising and prospective language teachers from a range of contexts, and the analysis also included the opinions of specialists in mathematics, history, science and chemistry on the extent to which characteristics claimed to be distinctive of language teachers applied to these other subjects. The findings of the study suggest that language teachers are seen to be distinctive in terms of the nature of the subject, the content of teaching, the teaching methodology, teacher-learner relationships, and contrasts between native and non-native speakers. The study also raises methodological and conceptual issues of relevance to further research into this area. Key amongst these are the need to define language teachers’ distinctive characteristics with reference to specific contexts rather than globally, the importance of comparisons between insider views on such distinctiveness and those from outside language teaching, and the value of comparative studies of actual classroom practices of language teaching and other subjects.

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