“The Nail That Sticks Out Gets Hammered down”: The Influence Of EFL Context On The Teacher Beliefs Of A Native English-Speaking Teacher

Abstract

The 1970s witnessed a paradigm shift in research into language learning and teaching with focus moving away from process-product approach to the study of teachers and their cognitions. This shift in research led teaching to be viewed as a cognitive process not merely in terms of behavior, and teachers as decision makers in the classroom not as merely implementers of external theories. In the same decade, teacher cognition emerged as a separate domain of research that investigates what teachers know, think and believe. Teaching context is one of the factors that influence the formation of teacher beliefs and the enactment of these beliefs. The present study is an attempt at understanding the influence of EFL setting on teacher beliefs of a native English-speaking teacher. To this end, a single native speaker English teacher was selected and data were collected through a number of tools. The data were analyzed using grounded theory data analysis steps. The current study found that context has certain influence on teachers’ beliefs and teachers’ pedagogical practices. It also found that the changes that occurred in the participant teacher’s beliefs were behavioral rather than cognitive and that the context’s influence on which beliefs teachers enact in practice is relatively more marked.