This project aims to explore the beliefs of international teachers regarding the students with whom they work, and the change in those beliefs over time. Participant observation, interviews, and questionnaires were used as tools of collection to address the following research questions: How did teachers' beliefs about students change over time? What variables were significantly associated with the rate of change in teacher beliefs about students? What types of challenges did teaches face while living and working in Thailand? Over the course of four months, I shadowed twenty-two U.S. teachers in thirteen different locations throughout Thailand. Participants were enrolled in an international teaching program in Thailand that provided a cultural orientation and teacher training. Participants were then assigned to teaching jobs throughout the country. Qualitative and quantitative data was analyzed using SPSS and NVivo software. This project contributes to the scholarship of teaching and learning, and anthropological and education research dedicated to exploring teachers' beliefs about students. Results of the study provide vital information about what variables or experiences may influence a critical analysis of beliefs among teachers working with students who they perceive as different from themselves. Due to some of the parallels between this study population and that of teachers in public schools within the United States, findings may also be applicable to preservice teacher training contexts that consider ways to help teachers critically reflect on their beliefs and worldviews in preparation for working with students whom they may perceive as different from themselves.

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Second/international language (L2) education contexts are increasingly recognized as fertile ground for the learning about “otherness”, teaching a new linguistic code and another way of seeing the world. This study contrasts how culture teaching beliefs and visions develop among new secondary school international language teachers in curriculum/methodology classes in two distinct teacher preparation programs. Using a comparative, multi-case study approach with a mixed methods design, this research uses complementary data sources including three repeated questionnaires, individual, focus group interviews and classroom observations to examine changes in culture teaching beliefs/visions. The research was informed by a sociocultural perspective in teacher education, a proposed model of teacher education impact and current thinking in culture and intercultural learning including Byram’s (1997) framework of intercultural communicative competence and post-modernist definitions of culture. Comparisons between the teacher educators involved show that culture teaching practices are strongly situated in historically embedded paradigms, contextual constraints of learning environments and framed by practitioners’ culture teaching beliefs. Findings indicate that teacher candidates’ culture teaching beliefs and visions evolve on individual pathways, depend on reflection, and are firmly rooted in previous beliefs about culture and L2 learning. Teacher education practices in these programs prompted both a facilitative and tempering effect on teacher candidate culture teaching beliefs and visions. Enthusiasm and curiosity about culture teaching increased and some teacher candidates saw culture teaching having perspective-changing benefits. Alternatively, many teacher candidates began to see increased complexity with culture teaching leading to insecurity about culture teaching knowledge and cultural credibility. Teacher candidates cited increased awareness of curricular and time constraints, concerns with stereotypes, the daunting breadth of culture and a lack of culture teaching models. Teachers with the most teaching and “living away” experience exhibited more culture teaching familiarity. Despite a brief appearance of some intercultural approaches, an instructivist approach working with the material dimension of the target culture dominated teachers’ culture teaching visions. Implications include rethinking the structure of L2 teacher preparation programs to provide more critical, ethnorelative reflection on culture, teacher identity, and to situate and operationalize culture teaching in teacher beliefs and experiences.

Second/international language (L2) education contexts are increasingly recognized as fertile ground for the learning about “otherness”, teaching a new linguistic code and another way of seeing the world. This study contrasts how culture teaching beliefs and visions develop among new secondary school international language teachers in curriculum/methodology classes in two distinct teacher preparation programs. Using a comparative, multi-case study approach with a mixed methods design, this research uses complementary data sources including three repeated questionnaires, individual, focus group interviews and classroom observations to examine changes in culture teaching beliefs/visions. The research was informed by a sociocultural perspective in teacher education, a proposed model of teacher education impact and current thinking in culture and intercultural learning including Byram’s (1997) framework of intercultural communicative competence and post-modernist definitions of culture. Comparisons between the teacher educators involved show that culture teaching practices are strongly situated in historically embedded paradigms, contextual constraints of learning environments and framed by practitioners’ culture teaching beliefs. Findings indicate that teacher candidates’ culture teaching beliefs and visions evolve on individual pathways, depend on reflection, and are firmly rooted in previous beliefs about culture and L2 learning. Teacher education practices in these programs prompted both a facilitative and tempering effect on teacher candidate culture teaching beliefs and visions. Enthusiasm and curiosity about culture teaching increased and some teacher candidates saw culture teaching having perspective-changing benefits. Alternatively, many teacher candidates began to see increased complexity with culture teaching leading to insecurity about culture teaching knowledge and cultural credibility. Teacher candidates cited increased awareness of curricular and time constraints, concerns with stereotypes, the daunting breadth of culture and a lack of culture teaching models. Teachers with the most teaching and “living away” experience exhibited more culture teaching familiarity. Despite a brief appearance of some intercultural approaches, an instructivist approach working with the material dimension of the target culture dominated teachers’ culture teaching visions. Implications include rethinking the structure of L2 teacher preparation programs to provide more critical, ethnorelative reflection on culture, teacher identity, and to situate and operationalize culture teaching in teacher beliefs and experiences.

This thesis focuses on the use of the mother tongue in foreign language teaching and learning. Recently there has been a notable shift towards promoting the use of the mother tongue. The theoretical part of the thesis maps the attitudes to the mother tongue in current literature as well as the suggested ways of its use in the classroom. The practical part attempts to analyse the students' attitudes towards the incorporation of Czech into English learning and teaching and their experience with its use from their secondary schools. To obtain the data, an online questionnaire was employed. The respondents are first- and second-year students of English and American studies who are expected to be able to analyse both the advantages and disadvantages of using Czech. The practical part focuses on the efficiency of Czech in comparison with English, ways of presenting grammar and vocabulary, the relation between the mother tongue use and the proficiency of students, and learning strategies of the respondents. Based on the analysis, suggestions regarding the mother tongue use are presented in the conclusion.

Différentes études ont montré que le niveau des futurs enseignants, issus des écoles publiques, en français langue étrangère (FLE) en Égypte est assez faible. Ceux-ci font un grand nombre d’erreurs répétitives à l’oral. Quoique ce manque de précision langagière puisse être dû à plusieurs facteurs, il appert que la rétroaction soit une des variables contribuant à ce phénomène (comme le nombre d’étudiants en classe, la durée du cours, l’âge et la motivation des étudiants, les méthodes d’enseignement, etc.). La rétroaction corrective est généralement définie comme toute correction explicite ou implicite de la part de l’enseignant indiquant que la production de l’apprenant est erronée. Elle est considérée comme indispensable dans les classes de langues secondes (LS) (Shmidt, 1983, 2001 ; Long, 1991, 1996 ; Lightbown, 1998). Pour ces raisons, cette étude porte sur la rétroaction corrective et, plus spécifiquement, sur les croyances des enseignants et des apprenants quant à celle-ci, ainsi qu’à son utilisation dans les classes de FLE en Égypte. Les recherches antérieures indiquent que les croyances des enseignants quant à l’acte d’enseigner influencent leurs pratiques en classe, que les croyances des apprenants influencent leur motivation, leur niveau et leurs efforts déployés pour l’apprentissage de la langue, et qu’une divergence entre les croyances des professeurs et celles des apprenants peut entraîner des effets négatifs sur l’apprentissage de la langue cible, ce qui indique ainsi qu’il est de grande importance d’explorer les croyances. Ainsi, la présente étude vise à explorer les croyances des professeurs égyptiens et celles de leurs étudiants en ce qui a trait à la rétroaction corrective à l’oral, la différence entre ces croyances, et l’identification des pratiques réelles des professeurs afin de décrire à quel point celles-ci reflètent les croyances exprimées. Pour ce faire, un questionnaire a été administré à 175 étudiants et 25 professeurs appartenant à trois universités égyptiennes afin de déterminer leurs croyances déclarées. Des entrevues semi-dirigées et des observations directes ont été réalisées auprès de neuf des 25 professeurs participants pour mieux déterminer leurs croyances et leurs pratiques rétroactives. Les résultats obtenus ont révélé qu’il existe des divergences importantes entre les croyances des professeurs et celles des étudiants, d’un côté, et entre les croyances des professeurs et leur pratique, de l’autre côté. Par exemple, la plupart des étudiants ont déclaré leur opposition à l’utilisation de la reformulation alors que presque la moitié des professeurs ont indiqué être en faveur de cette même technique. Les professeurs ont indiqué que leur choix de techniques rétroactives dépend du type d’erreurs et qu’ils préfèrent inciter les apprenants à s’auto corriger. Cependant, ces mêmes professeurs ont utilisé la reformulation pour corriger la majorité des erreurs de leurs apprenants, quelle que soit leur nature. Nous parvenons ainsi à la conclusion que l’utilisation de la reformulation, qui fait l’objet d’une divergence au niveau des croyances, pourrait être à l’origine du manque de précision langagière rapporté par les chercheurs. / Previous research revealed that Egyptian learners of French as a foreign language who will be the future teachers of French in Egypt produce numerous errors repetitively during oral productions. While this lack of accuracy can be attributed to a cohort of factors (number of students in class, duration of course, age and motivation of students, methods of teaching, etc.), it is assumed in the present study that corrective feedback could be at the origins of the reported results. Defined as implicit or explicit teacher reactions to the learners’ incorrect renditions, corrective feedback is seen by many second language acquisition researchers (Schmidt, 1983, 2001; Long, 1991, 1996; Lightbown, 1998) as a driving force behind interlanguage development. Among other things, corrective feedback draws learners’ attention to form and helps them notice the gap between their interlanguage and the L2 norm. In light of these theoretical arguments along with empirical research findings indicating the benefits of corrective feedback, the present study investigated corrective feedback provided in French as a foreign language classes in Egyptian universities. More specifically, the study explored teachers’ and students’ beliefs about feedback as well as teachers’ in-class use of feedback. Previous research on beliefs indicates that teachers’ beliefs shape their teaching and that learners’ beliefs affect their motivation and determine the effort students are willing to deploy to learn the target language. Based on these theoretical and empirical claims, the present study investigated teachers’ and students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback in learning French as a foreign language in Egypt and explored teachers’ actual corrective feedback practices to determine the extent to which they correspond to their declared beliefs. A beliefs questionnaire was administered to 175 students and 25 language teachers to determine their beliefs about corrective feedback. Nine of the 25 teachers were also interviewed and observed for a total of 27 hours to further investigate their beliefs and in-class practices. The results indicate a mismatch between teachers’ and students’ beliefs on the one hand, and a divergence between teachers’ beliefs and their actual teaching on the other. In terms of the relationship between students’ and teachers’ beliefs, the results reveal that while the majority of the learners do not see recasts as an effective feedback technique, almost half of the teachers do. As for the mismatch between teachers’ beliefs and their in-class practices, a two-fold pattern emerged. First, all the teachers reported that error type determined the technique they used to correct errors and that they preferred to push their learners to self-correct. However, recasts proved to be the technique of choice and that was regardless of error type. Instances of self-correction were rare with teachers choosing to recast most of their students’ errors instead of pushing them to remedy the errors on their own. As such, it may be speculated that the teachers’ choice of corrective feedback techniques, which happens to run counter to the students’ expectations (as shown in the beliefs questionnaire) may be a major factor behind the students’ reported lack of accuracy

Thesis (DAppLing)--Macquarie University, Faculty of Human Sciences, Department of Linguistics, 2009. / Bibliography: p. 167-188. / Introduction -- Contextual background -- Literature review -- Methodology -- Pre-service teachers' beliefs about being a teacher -- Practicum students' beliefs about the teaching experience -- Teachers' first year experience: beliefs and reflections -- Conclusions. / This research focuses on the analysis of the beliefs of pre-service Mexican student-teachers from a public university in central Mexico who have learned English as adolescents or young adults. Specifically, it examines their beliefs about teaching and about themselves as English teachers in different stages of initial professional development. The participants reflected on their experiences as English language learners, students, teaching practicum students and as first year teachers in a follow up study. -- This thesis is composed of three studies that are linked by involving the same participants. The studies follow these participants through different stages in their initial development as teachers.The research is set within the qualitative research paradigm and draws on qualitative data and interpretive analysis. The data were retrieved using the following procedures: autobiographies, a focus group interview, journals, personal interviews and short narratives. -- Responses to the following research questions emerged through the different stages of this thesis. 1. What initial beliefs do pre-service and beginning students hold about being a teacher? 2. Do these beliefs evolve or change during the initial stages of their teacher development? 3. Do their experiences during their initial stages of their development influence their beliefs? -- There is little research on English language teacher beliefs in Mexico. It is considered that research in this area can contribute to the understanding of the processes of what English language teachers' beliefs are and how they evolve or develop over time and the influences that they may have on the actual teaching process. This research may contribute to bring to the attention of English language teacher preparation programs the necessity of providing opportunities for student-teachers to unpack their beliefs and reflect and view them in the light of the courses and their practice in order to create an understanding of the Mexican educational context of which they will be a part. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / viii, 265 p

"December 2008". / Thesis (DAppLing)--Macquarie University, Division of Linguistics and Psychology, Dept. of Linguistics, 2009. / Bibliography: p. 299-327. / Introduction -- Literature review -- Study 1 -- Study 2 -- Conclusions. / The aim of this case study was to identify the beliefs of eight pre-service teachers about thesis writing and professional development while and after writing their BA thesis through diary and survey inquiry. This research was conducted in the teaching area of the major in Modern Languages (LEMO) from the Autonomous University of Puebla (BUAP). The methodology used to identify trainee beliefs was applied in two periods: during the process to include reflection in action, and after the process obtaining reflection on action as suggested by Schön (1983, p. 26). Thus, the participants wrote their electronic dialogue diaries while taking the two Research Seminars and writing their thesis. In this diaries they expressed their thoughts and feelings, sent them to the teacher and the teacher answered them also via e-mail. Then, when the Research Seminars had finished, they answered the questionnaire called Thesis and Professional Development Questionnaire (TAPDQ), which was especially designed for this research taking insights from Eraut (1995), Fullan(1995), Burns et al (1999), Schmekes (2004) and Viaggio (1992). This questionnaire contains Likert scales and some open questions. The findings of these studies reveal that participants were aware of their lack of expertise in thesis writing and they looked for strategies to overcome this problem. Also, the findings suggest that the participants were benefited from the constructivist methodology employed in the Research Seminars. Most of the participants reported having acquired skills, knowledge, having improved their attitude and having become better students after writing their thesis. This doctoral thesis begins exploring an area that has not been explored on ELT teacher cognition at least as reported in the research reviews done by Borg (2003, 2006) and Reyes & Rodríguez (2007). It aims to contribute to get a better understanding the thesis writing processes in teacher education programmes in public universities in Mexico. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / xvii, 359 p