Beliefs and reality: How educational experiences in the United States affect teaching practices of Japanese EFL teachers

In the past few decades, many countries including Japan have sought to make their English teaching approaches more communicative. As a result, TESOL programs in English-speaking countries have attracted more international trainees aspiring to learn about communicative language teaching (CLT). Concerns about the applicability of such programs have arisen, however, particularly for international trainees whose teaching contexts are quite different from those assumed by most Western programs. Moreover, recent trends in teacher education place strong emphasis on what trainees bring to these programs, as there has been a growing awareness among teacher educators and researchers that the mere transmission of knowledge about language teaching does not adequately support the professional development of teachers. Given this background, this study aims to elucidate the impact of the particular educational experiences of four Japanese EFL teachers in an American graduate TESOL program on their beliefs and teaching practices, and to explore what they value from their experiences in the program after returning to Japan.;Data was collected through a series of in-depth interviews with each of the participants. The findings suggest that the interaction of the theoretical knowledge they acquired in the TESOL program and first-hand learning experiences as graduate students impacted them the most, transforming their beliefs about language learning from predominantly teacher-centered views toward more learner-centered views. Teaching context was also found to influence the teachers' perceptions of what they could apply from their overseas experiences. Unlike the findings of some studies, however, this study found that newly shaped beliefs remained stable even though these teachers faced difficulties in implementing CLT. This dissertation concludes with some implications for teacher educators on how to better meet the needs of non-native EFL teachers. These include a discussion of the content and process of learning in teacher education programs, and in particular, the importance of the "modeling" function of such programs in offsetting trainees' "apprenticeship of observation."...