Suplantación de las bebidas tradicionales por las bebidas modernas

Teacher Cognition (Borg 2003; 2006; Ellis 2006; Manning & Payne 1993) represents a branch of educational research which has shed light on our understanding of how macro,

micro and personal factors inform the way teachers perform their job. Borg (2003) defines teacher cognition as ‘what teachers think, know, and believe and the relationships of these mental constructs to what teachers do in the language teaching classroom’ (p. 81). Johnson (2006) points out that over the last four decades there has been a dramatic shift in the way educational research has conceptualised Teacher Cognition and consequently informed teacher education. Research into teachers’ mental lives and cognitions (e.g. Breen et al. 2001; Borg 1999; 2003; 2006; 2009; 2011; Crandall, 2000; Ellis 2006; Freeman, 2002; Manning & Payne 1993; Sanchez, 2010; Walberg, 1977; Woods 1996) reveals that teachers’ prior experiences, their understandings of their practices and more importantly, their contexts of work have a very important influence on how and why they act in particular ways. It is now clear that studying language and meta-language as well as language acquisition theory does not ipso facto translate into appropriate teaching practices. Rather, emphasis is now being given to teachers’ praxis (Edge & Richards, 1998) a transformative process by which through permeating the theory they learn with their own experiences, teachers become both consumers and producers of theory in ways that are appropriate for their contexts (Johnson, 2003). Theory directs their practice which in turn corrects theory making it possible for teachers to act in ways that produce modified versions of ‘old’ theory, or new theory altogether. The impact of such research is what has been referred to as the

sociocultural turn (Johnson, 2006) namely an epistemological departure from the

positivistic paradigm informing the transmission of new methodologies to teachers to the construction of individual knowledge through knowledge of the communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) but, and more importantly, the immediate social context within which the individual teacher participates. In other words, social construction of good practices as opposed to handing down recommended practices is now being encouraged in some

tertiary learning contexts resulting in the mapping of research concepts like reflective teaching (Lockhart & Richards, 1994) action research (Edge, 2001; Wallace, 1998) teacher research (Burns, 1999; Edge & Richards, 1993) and exploratory practice (Allwright, 2003; 2005; Allwright and Hanks, 2009) which all legitimize teachers’ knowledge and highlight the importance of reflective inquiry into the experiences of teachers as mechanisms for change in classroom practice (Johnson, 2006). In the light of this epistemological shift, the perspective adapted in this study involves teachers exploring their experiential knowledge within a background of their understanding of theory. In the case of many of these teachers, the theory dominating their professional lives may be related to the NPA yet giving them an opportunity to reflect on their own pragmatic responses to the daily conundrums of their classrooms may generate both personal and shared perspectives and practices that may point to new dimensions of theoretical and practice-oriented development.

2.9. Summary and Point of Departure

So far, I have made the point that top-down educational policies, as well as the discourses of methods, postmethod and best practice have not yet unequivocally addressed the conundrums of classroom situations all over the world. This is even more so in contexts like Cameroon where teachers work in difficult or unfavourable circumstances (West, 1960) where factors, such as large classes, the shortage or complete absence of material resources such as course books and technology, the influence of high stakes end-of-course examinations plus the multilingual backgrounds of many classrooms makes teaching almost unbearable, thus forcing teachers to adapt practical solutions to, indeed pragmatic responses to the realities of their contexts (Kuchah & Smith, 2011). What is more, the method, postmethod and best practice

discourses reviewed above have focused on considerably ‘favourable’ contexts ignoring a large part of the ELT community that is not as privileged as the resource-packed ‘north’ contexts. The so-called ‘advanced methodologies’ from the West have in a way disadvantaged teachers and learners in many places by failing to recognise their contextual circumstances (Ellis, 1996; Ha, 2004; Liu, 1998) and in spite of arguments raised by researchers (e.g. Ha, 2004) that practices of teachers are to an extent culture- bound and as such what one culture perceives as culturally appropriate should not be used as a basis for devaluing other cultural pedagogic practices which may represent similar qualities differently, biased and even condescending perspectives of non-BANA pedagogies still exist. As Maley (2001) has pointed out, the ‘mainstream literature’ on ELT has continued to systematically neglect the realities of such circumstances as I have presented in section 2.7 above, even though they have constituted the commonest and, one would say, most prevalent kind of context for ELT in the world. He further argues that a majority of the contexts in which English is taught in the world is far removed from the ideal situations taken for granted in ELT debates dominated by the applied linguistics discourse community and the inventory of methodological ideas that emanate from such debates has little to offer by way of possible solutions to the problems of difficult circumstances and suggests that what is more likely to be workable in these circumstances are locally focussed efforts of a more broadly educational, rather than narrowly linguistic, nature.

Perhaps the time has come to turn to teachers’ informed pragmatic responses to their particular classrooms and contexts to examine how they mediate between the demands of educational systems and the needs and abilities of their learners. A compelling need arises therefore to examine the value of the practices of teachers in mainstream state

schools from where, as Holliday (1994b) puts it, few examples of high-status methodologies have grown and as a consequence, teachers have often been forced to make difficult adaptations of methodology which do not really suit their context (p.13). Research into good teaching/teachers (Liu & Meng, 2009; Kutnick & Jules, 1993; Reichel & Arnon, 2009; Beishuizen et al., 2001; Jules & Kutnick, 1997; Arnon & Reichel, 2007) reveals that contextual and cultural factors amongst other things influence perceptions of good teachers and teaching. In studies that focus on young learners (e.g. Kutnick & Jules, 1993) good teaching is defined by a combination of teaching skill and good relationships with pupils while studies that explore perceptions of teachers’ good teaching is defined by how well teachers establish personal relationships with students (Beishuizen et al., 2001) but also by personal qualities and knowledge of the subject taught as well as didactic knowledge. Prabhu (1990) takes the discussion further by showing the different factors that a teacher needs to conceptualise from in order to arrive at a sense of plausibility, that is, a theory or pedagogic intuition of

how learning takes place and how teaching causes or supports it:

Teachers need to operate with some personal conceptualisation of how their teaching leads to desired learning – with a notion of causation that has a measure of credibility for them. The conceptualisation may arise from a number of different sources, including a teacher’s experience in the past as a learner (with interpretations of how teaching received at that time did or did not support one’s learning) a teacher’s earlier experience of teaching (with similar interpretations from the teaching end), exposure to one or more methods while training as a teacher (with some subjective evaluation of the methods concerned and perhaps a degree of identification with one or another of them), what a teacher knows or thinks of other teachers’ actions or opinions, and perhaps a teacher’s experience as parent or caretaker (p. 172).

It is the search for features of pedagogic practice that emanate from this sense of plausibility within the context of large state primary school classes in Cameroon that constitutes the focus of the present study. My purpose is to pursue a bottom-up,

classroom- and workshop-based approach to identifying pedagogic practices that are considered by both learners and teachers as appropriate to the particular context of Cameroonian primary school teachers, with the aim of arriving at a model of teacher development that facilitates the appropriation of (some of) these practices. As research has shown, a fundamental reason for the policy-practice disconnection is the failure to fully consider the social, cultural and educational needs of teachers in the policy/innovation conception process. The very top-down nature in which such policies/innovations are transmitted to, and imposed on practitioners, the aura of pedagogic devaluation of teachers’ current practices that permeates pedagogic innovations and TT&D workshops, and the consequent rejection of these policies/innovations by practitioners militate for a more teacher-friendly approach to pedagogic innovation and teacher development. It is in exploring the positive features of teachers’ practices as determined by their sense of plausibility and building on these to develop a dynamic professional basis for incorporating innovations which are firmly anchored to their contextual realities that we can attempt to bridge the policy-practice gap. To achieve this, I propose to investigate shared features of contextually plausible pedagogic practices so as to establish a database of practices which can inform a framework upon which subsequent researchers and policy makers can build to arrive at contextually appropriate decisions that reflect and are reflected in the reality of a particular community of practitioners. In doing this, I take the precaution not to define a priori categories, but to observe, elicit and record these features as they emerge from the field. In this way, my study is an attempt to implement Holliday’s (1994b) argument for an ELT methodology which is appropriate to the social context within which it is developed and used.

Chapter Three Research Methodology

3.0. Introduction

This chapter sets out to present, explain and justify the research design and procedure adopted for this study. It begins by presenting the research paradigm underlying the study and goes ahead to describe the research design and methodological procedure for participant selection, data generation and analysis. Matters of validity and reliability of data collection instruments as well as ethical and other field issues are also explained.