4.5.1 Summary of the key findings
In summary, the participant’s cognition was both consistent and inconsistent with her classroom practices. Consistencies were found in all four themes of the study including accuracy and fluency, speaking elements, teacher roles, and teacher feedback. To focus on accuracy, she used three types of activities as stated in the semi-structured interview including question-and-answer, substitution, and repetition. To help students develop oral fluency, she used a role-play as she had thought she should. In terms of speaking elements, she taught two elements including speech act and some fixed phrases. In terms of teacher roles, she played the roles of facilitator and resource as stated in the semi-structured interview. To give feedback in accuracy-focused activities, she asked students to repeat what they had said and explicitly corrected their mistakes. To give feedback in fluency- focused activities, she often reformulated their mistakes. Inconsistencies were found in fluency-focused activities, teacher roles, and feedback in fluency-focused activities. To focus on fluency, she usually used question-and-answer activities which had not been mentioned in the semi-structured interview. Although she thought feedback provider and participant were the least frequent roles she should
adopt in her class, her practices showed that they were the most frequent ones.
Furthermore, she was also often a controller in accuracy-focused activities although she had not thought she should play this role in her class. In terms of feedback in fluency-focused activities, she corrected the students’ mistakes by using some ways she had not thought she should including echoing and facial expressions. In summary, consistencies between her cognition and classroom practices were found in all four themes of the study; and inconsistences in terms of fluency-focused activities, teacher roles, and feedback in fluency-focused activities. These findings were shown in the figure below.
1. Accuracy and Fluency
2. Speaking elements
3. Teacher roles
4. Teacher feedback
Figure 4.1 The relationship between the participant’s cognition and classroom practices related to four themes of English speaking instruction
Note: : consistent : inconsistent
The figure above showed that the participant’s cognition was both consistent and inconsistent with her classroom practices. Consistencies were found in all four
Classroom practices Teacher
cognition
themes of the study including accuracy and fluency, speaking elements, teacher roles, and teacher feedback. Inconsistencies were seen in three themes including accuracy and fluency, teacher roles, and teacher feedback. In the next section, the discussion of the key findings will be presented.
4.5.2 Discussion of the key findings
The findings showed that the teacher’s cognition was both consistent and inconsistent with her classroom practices. This was consistent with the findings of the studies of Farrell and Lim (2005), Phipps and Borg (2009), Yue’e and Yunzhang (2011), Melketo (2012), and Gerami and Noordin (2013). The discussion above revealed that the inconsistencies were caused by two reasons. First, the teacher possessed two types of cognition including ideal-oriented cognition and reality-oriented cognition, and her classroom practices were consistent with the latter. This was shown by the frequent use of question-and-answer activities and the roles she often played (feedback provider and participant) to help her students develop both accuracy and fluency because their English levels were still low.
Second, she was not fully aware of the impact of one cognition on her classroom practices. To give feedback, she thought she should help students self-correct their mistakes by reformulating, giving hints, and asking them to repeat what they had said. Although she had not thought she should echo her students’ mistakes or use facial expressions, these two techniques were actually found in her classroom practices. In the stimulated recall interview, she said that “they were good ways”
(SR) to help students self-correct their mistakes. This showed that she was not fully aware that her cognition about helping students self-correct their mistakes also led to the use of echoing and facial expressions. She only realized this when being asked to reflect on her classroom practices in the stimulated recall interview.
Students’ levels were found to be the primary cause of the inconsistencies between her ideal-oriented cognition and classroom practices. Other studies also found some student factors that led to inconsistencies between teacher (ideal-oriented) cognition and classroom practices. They were students’ level, responsiveness, motivation, and
expectations in the study of Phipps and Borg (2009) and students’ participation in the study of Yue’e and Yunzhang (2011).
In summary, the discussion of the findings revealed that the inconsistencies between the participant’s cognition and classroom practices were caused by two reasons. First, her classroom practices were guided by her reality-oriented cognition. Second, she was not fully aware of the impact of one cognition on her classroom practices. Therefore, to understand the relationship between teacher cognition and classroom practices more clearly, it is important to identify both types of teacher cognition (ideal-oriented cognition and reality-oriented cognition) and examine the full impact of each cognition on classroom practices.