Reflecting on teaching: Interactive thoughts and decisions of experienced and novice EFL teachers

ABSTRACT REFLECTING ON TEACHING: INTERACTIVE THOUGHTS AND DECISIONS OF EXPERIENCED AND NOVICE EFL TEACHERS EBRU ŞİRE Ph. D. Dissertation, English Language Teaching Department. Supervisor: Profc Dr. F. özden EKMEKÇİ May 2004, 361 pages This study is mainly concerned with the instructional decisions EFL teachers make in the class (Le., interactive decisions). It aims to contribute to our understanding of what teachers are thinking about when they make a particular interactive instructional decision. The ultimate purpose is to investigate and compare the interactive thinking and decision making process of experienced and novice teachers. The underlying assumption is that teachers' behavior is guided by their reason based thoughts, judgments, and decisions. Therefore, the study adopts a cognitive and interpretative approach. Four novice and four experienced EFL teachers participated in the study. The data were collected through videotaping procedure, stimulated recall technique, semi- structured interviews, lesson plans, classroom maps, and snakes. The study was conducted at YADIM (Le., Center for Foreign Languages), Çukurova University. In the study, each teacher was videotaped three times in her regular classes, and then she was invited to comment on her in-class behaviors and interactive decisions at the stimulated recall interviews. The findings were analyzed and interpreted both quantitatively and qualitatively.The results indicate that the complexity of teachers' thinking process change in regard to their expertise level. In line with this finding, the interactive decision making process of the experienced teachers is seen to be much more complicated than that of the novices in the study. Moreover, the experienced teachers are observed to employ a wider set of instructional actions in response to the student performance cues. However, both the experienced teachers and the novices are able to recognize student performance cues they observe in the class. Another finding indicates that the novice teachers are much more concerned with the classroom management related issues especially with student off task behavior and develop a good repertoire of coping strategies to deal with such behaviors. In addition, interactive decision making models are proposed for both the experienced and novice teachers throughout the study. The results of the study suggest some significant implications not only for in- service teacher training programs but also for pre-service teacher training programs. Besides, the study also covers some methodological and theoretical implications for future research. KEYWORDS: Interactive Decision Experienced Teacher Novice Teacher Stimulated Recall Technique Student Performance Cue