A Case Study of EFL Teachers Beliefs about Vocabulary and Their Practices

This article reports a case study which investigates the relationship between three EFL teachers’ beliefs and their practices with regard to vocabulary. It takes up Borg’s (2009) call for furtherinvestigations in vocabulary as one of the scarcely-studied components of language within a languageteacher cognition (LTC) framework. The study was conducted in a university context using four different instruments to collect the data, two open-ended structured questionnaires, classroomobservations (for the whole semester), two stimulated recall interviews, and material analysis. All thecollected data was imported into NVivo for an easier management and analysis. To check the trustworthiness of the results another TEFL graduate student was asked to go through the wholecoding process as a second operator within the same NVivo project. The participants in this studymanifested different beliefs about what aspects of vocabulary to teach and the differences resulted in a variety of practices. For one of the participants, the observed practices were a mirror of his beliefs; however, this was not the case for the two other participants. A comparison of their beliefs and practices as well as the causes of the observed incongruences will be presented here. This study has some implications which can be beneficial to both teacher educators, and teachers.

Keywords:

Teachers’ beliefs , Teachers’ practices , Vocabulary