A Case Study of Taiwanese English Language Teachers’ Instructional Decisions

• Main Authors: Pao-Sheng Hsieh, 謝寶生
• Other Authors: Hsiu-Ting Hung
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/13686241545920788456

碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 應用英語研究所 === 101 === This study explored the instructional decisions of EFL teachers in the planning, interactive, and evaluative stages. At the planning stage, all teachers need to make decisions and to formulate their lesson plans. At interactive stage, they implement lesson plans and often need to make immediate changes to these in order to better suit the context. At the last stage, teachers access the outcomes of their lesson plans and work to improve their abilities as their evaluative decisions. This study thus aimed at discovering major factors that affect teachers’ instructional decisions at all three stages. The participants in this study were three EFL teachers at a public university in the southern Taiwan. These teacher participants (one male and two females) offered elective courses for non-English major students, and had different levels of teaching experience, ranged from one and a half years to seven years. The sources of data included semi-structured interviews, stimulated recall interviews, and classroom observations. The collected data were content analyzed using an analytical framework developed by the researcher. The findings of this research indicate that teacher knowledge plays a critical role in teachers’ instructional decisions across all three stages of decision-making. However, the three teachers acknowledge that their professional knowledge is mostly developed through their own teaching experiences. This study thus suggests that EFL teachers in Taiwan should be provided with more professional development opportunities to actively develop inservice EFL teachers’ practical knowledge.