The Discrepancy between Teachers’ Belief and Practice, from the Sociocultural Perspective

Abstract

Considering teachers’ belief as a construct and its relationship with teachers’ practice, a growing body of research has explored the effect of teachers’ belief on their practice while there is a bulk of research on the discrepancy between teachers’ belief and practice. However, most of the studies indicate that teachers’ beliefs should be studied within a framework that is aware of the influence of culture and context leading to the point that teachers’ belief is context dependent. The purpose of this paper is to present an argument about the relationship of teachers’ beliefs and practices and to find out sociocultural framework to explore the inconsistency of this relationship. Discussing the nature of teachers’ beliefs, the relationship among beliefs, knowledge and practices, sociocultural perspectives is explored to explain the inconsistency between teachers’ beliefs and practices found in the sample of the study. To this end a two-phase, sequential explanatory mixed methods study was employed to obtain quantitative results and then select participants for follow-up interviews to further clarify the results. In the first phase, quantitative research questions addressed the relationship between teachers’ pedagogical and epistemological beliefs in relation to eight teaching methods the teachers might utilize in the classroom. 20 teachers teaching different levels of English proficiency from Kish Institute are randomly chosen for this phase. Epistemic Belief Inventory (EBI) is used to be scattered among the teachers addressing their pedagogical and epistemological belief about teaching. 5 teachers scored high and 5 teachers scored low are chosen based on their responses to the questionnaires. Determining the target participants through the previous stage, qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore how teachers described their beliefs about those eight constituent of teaching. The interviews are transcribed and codified. Using theme analysis, the main themes of teachers’ belief are extracted and explained. In the second phase, the actual practices of these ten teachers are observed by the researchers and an observation checklist is filled out for each teacher to determine the congruity or incongruity between teachers’ belief and practice. Analyzing the main themes of teachers belief and comparing them with the observation checklist, a brief description of each class is reported in the next chapter and the antecedent of the mismatches are discussed under the rubric of sociocultural framework.