The analysis of English teachers' beliefs about different teaching methods of teaching English as a second language

Abstract

The main purpose of the present study is to discover ESL teachers’ beliefs and what they describe as their own teaching practices. Besides, the purpose is to find out if their beliefs when giving a lesson are strong enough to coincide with other teachers’ practices based on different approaches of second language instruction. The analyzed corpus consists of 5 ESL Chilean teachers; 2 females and 3 males, all around the age of thirty years old. They all currently live and work in Chilean cities and have more than 5 years of teaching experience in different educational contexts. The eliciting technique was a structured survey, where the informants were asked to answer open ended questions, to face a lesson taught through three different teaching methods (Grammar translation, Audio-lingual and the Communicative approaches), to finally mark preferences in a Likert scale. The results confirm the importance of having clear and strong beliefs, and how these determine the way we think, act and make decisions when giving an ESL lesson; which is consistent with the reviewed literature about teaching beliefs. Also, even though not all the participants were consistent in their responses, most of them showed coincidences between what they declare as their own teaching practices and what they believe about other teachers’ instruction. The study will benefit different actors belonging to the teaching context. First, ESL teachers will be able to understand which their ESL beliefs are, second, English institutions will have the opportunity to use this to know in advance what type of teacher they are hiring, and third, students learning English as a second language will be able to choose who the most suitable teacher is according to their needs. In general terms, this study will contribute to the field of teaching English as a second language.