Exploring Teachers' Knowledge And Practice

Since 1980s, teacher thinking or teacher cognition has attracted much attention in educational scholarship. The researchers have been looking for cognitive factors underlying teacher's observable practices and exploring how teachers' thinking is shaped and developed. This line of research also appears in the field of second language teaching (including EFL and ESL) examining language teachers' thinking process. It is assumed that second language teachers' thoughts, judgments and decisions influence the nature of second language instruction (Freeman, 1990; Richards& Nunan, 1990; Freeman & Johnson, 1998).Conversational interaction between language learners and their interlocutors is a much studied topic in second language acquisition scholarship for the past twenty years (Chuadron, 1988; Ellis, 1994) and has been found to influence language learning in an important way. But how much foreign language teachers know about this and how their knowledge relates to their practice are worth studying.This is a multi-case study conducted with four EFL teachers from different universities, to explore their knowledge on conversational interaction in second language classroom. Based on the qualitative research methodology, the data are mainly transcripts of three types of audio-recording: stimulated recall interview, semi-structured interview and observed classes. The writer adopts the perspectives of both the psycholinguistics interactionist theory and the social interactionist theory, to examine teachers' knowledge on classroom interaction in terms of teachers' questioning, feedback and negotiation. The data are presented using three methods: narrative, cross-case analysis and quantification.The major finding includes: 1) the four teachers realize the importance of classroom interaction on language acquisition; 2)their knowledge on T-S interaction is seen in the following aspects: they all believe asking more questions is beneficial, but as to the proportion of referential questions to display questions, they have different awareness and behaviors; they all embrace positive feedback and use few corrective feedback; they use negotiation to various extend(with more negotiation of meaning), but they do not show explicit awareness about it; 3) some knowledge which the teachers use in their teaching practice can not be clearly articulated in technical terms; 4) four teachers think that formal instruction and teaching practice could influence their knowledge and practice, but they seem to cherish the latter more; 5) teaching experience is important for their teaching and there is an influential person in their teaching, whether theoretically or practically.