Teachers’ Decision Making in EFL Classroom

This research attempts to make its contribution to the growing sociolinguistic literature on classroom foreign/second language learning and teaching.

It reports a comparative ethnographic inquiry into the similarities and differences of decision making and decision-making process employed by two categories of teachers when approaching planning and instruction in the language classrooms in Chinese EFL teaching context.

And the thought-provoking reasons for these similarities and differences have also been explored through the analysis of a range of broad research questions, i.e. first, how do two sets of teachers approach instructional decisions in the similar settings; second, can we have access to the similarities and differences between their instructional decisions; third, what factors might affect their pedagogical decisions; and fourth, are their instructional decisions consistent with their theoretical ideas.

Two categories of teachers consist of five Chinese TEL and five western teachers respectively, who work in two similar teaching institutions in China.The selected basic data gathered through a sequence of survey, observations, and particular information elicitation techniques consist of the running accounts of observation, lesson plans, and over fifty hours of audio-recording of class sessions and interviews.
Through analysis of selected lesson excerpts and teachers’ comments on these data we identify similarities and differences in the classroom interpretation of the tasks and participation structures that these teachers adopted in their instruction, and the underlying reasons behind them with reference to beliefs, context, prior experiences and culture.

The most general conclusion is that: whether they emphasize accuracy or fluency, and whether they prefer student-centered instruction or teacher-centered, they tend to capitalize on these theories eclectically, though they do differ in the extent to which they stress one focus or another. Therefore, much of a teacher’s decision on planning and instruction resides in the way he/she interprets the teaching setting and acts on the information from the ongoing classroom interactions.

In the last two chapters of this book, the subject of teacher's decision-making is explored from the perspective of soft power and critical discourse analysis, so that teachers' decision-making research can be considered more deeply in the aspect of cognitive, discourse and linguistic philosophy.