EFL teachers’ beliefs and their practices in grammar teaching and corrective feedback: A case study

Abstract

This Language Teacher Cognition (LTC) study primarily explores language teachers’ beliefs and practices about two common Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA) constructs: Grammar Teaching (GT) and Corrective Feedback (CF). This study also aims to investigate to what extent teacher beliefs and practices compromise with each other and cognitive and contextual factors behind their cognition. The data were collected through multiple sources including interviews, observations, and stimulated recall with the teachers from the preparatory school of a state university. The findings after a within-case and cross-case analysis revealed that coursebook-based beliefs, experience-based beliefs, lack of theoretical knowledge and inclination for communicative activities influence what teachers believe about GT. There are both congruent and incongruent relationships between beliefs and practices varying from one teacher to another due to the effect of experiential knowledge, unconscious decisions, and some contextual factors. The teachers commonly lack theoretical knowledge about CF, they use recast most, and they tend to avoid CF during communicative activities; however, they differ from each other in terms of their CF choices for the target structure, grammar exercises, students and context. CF practices are aligned with their beliefs except for a few divergences stemming from unconscious and instant decisions. The findings can contribute to the integration of LTC into ISLA studies to reach more comprehensive results and to LTC framework by exploring the effects of many variables on teachers’ decision making processes.