Understanding Novice and Experienced Teachers’ Cognitions and Practices for Sustainable Teacher Development: The Case of Form-Focused Instruction in English Language Teaching

Abstract

Framed in Complexity Theory, this paper presents a multi-case study of Chinese university English teachers’ cognitions and practices about form-focused instruction in English language teaching. Four teachers, including two novice teachers and two experienced ones, were involved in the study. A triangulation method, including semi-structured interviews, classroom observations and stimulated recall interviews, was used to examine and compare their cognitions and practices. Research findings reveal that all teachers favoured focus on form instruction rather than focus on forms instruction in English teaching in their cognitions; however, the two novice teachers failed to implement focus on form instruction in practices, whereas the two experienced teachers carried it out consistently. The result calls for effective teacher education programmes for sustainable teacher development, particularly in sustaining the development of novice teachers’ knowledge about how to implement focus on form instruction in pedagogical practice. The implications arising from this study for L2 teacher education in China and similar L2 contexts are also discussed.

Developing and Validating the English Teachers’ Cognitions About Grammar Teaching Questionnaire (TCAGTQ) to Uncover Teacher Thinking

“…Research into language teacher cognition emerged and flourished as the study of language teaching shifted its focus from a process-product approach to a teachers’ thinking paradigm ( Clark and Peterson, 1986 ; Sun and Zhang, 2019 , 2021 , 2022 ; Gao et al, 2020 ; Gao and Zhang, 2020 ; Li, 2020 ). Borg (2003) thinks that “the unobservable cognitive dimension of teaching: what teachers know, believe, and think” (p. 81) is the knowledge base that is typically called teacher cognition.…”

“…English language teaching has undergone massive changes in the past several decades in China ( Jiang and Zhang, 2021 ; Yuan and Zhang, 2021 ; Chen et al, 2022 ; Liu and Chu, 2022 ; Sun and Zhang, 2022 ). University English teaching has been critiqued for its teacher-centered classrooms and dominance of the traditional Grammar-Translation teaching method ( Liu and Xu, 2017 ; Wang and Zhang, 2021 ; Wu X. M. et al, 2021 ; Zhang and Zhang, 2021 ).…”

“…Unfortunately, students instructed by this method are “deaf and dumb” English learners, which means that they gain insufficient listening and speaking skills and still have difficulty in verbal communication. In response to this issue in college English teaching, the Chinese Ministry of Education (hereafter MOE), has made massive top-down reforms for advancing English language teaching (ELT) ( Zhang and Liu, 2014 ; Li et al, 2020 ; Teng and Zhang, 2020 ; Sun and Zhang, 2022 ). A recent reform is that the MOE has released the College English Curriculum Requirements (CECR) ( Chinese Ministry of Education, 2007 ; see an updated version released in 2017), which is a mandate for college English teaching.…”

Application of Clustering Algorithm in English Proficiency Evaluation under the Framework of Big Data

“…Kurada tested the iris data set and the experimental results show that the clustering accuracy of the built model on Iris data set is improved to more than 96%, and the clustering results are relatively stable and the running time is significantly reduced. Finally, the improved k-means algorithm model is used to mine the English score data, which brings objective guiding opinions to the relevant Chinese and English teaching implementers, so as to make the data mining play an auxiliary role in Teaching [22].…”

A genre-based approach in the secondary school English writing class: Voices from student-teachers in the teaching practicum

“…Regardless of the different stances on the advisability of GBA, compared with other EFL writing instructional approaches like the product-oriented approach, which accentuates students’ accurate use of vocabulary, syntax, and cohesive devices in writing ( Jiang et al, 2021 ), and the process-oriented approach, which engages students with a recursive process of prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing, GBA can help students not only notice the linguistics features and rhetorical structures of a certain text, but also understand why they are writing (purpose), who they are writing for (audience), and how to write (organization) in order to realize particular communicative purposes of the text ( Chen and Su, 2012 ). To achieve the desirable learning outcomes, researchers have generally agreed on the centrality of teacher knowledge, that is teachers’ “thinking about teaching and learning that guides their classroom decisions and actions” ( Sun and Zhang, 2022 . p. 2), on the success of genre pedagogies ( Worden, 2018a , 2019 ; Kindenberg, 2021 ).…”