Novice Non-Native English Language Teachers’ Imaginary and Actual Decision Making and Pedagogical Reasoning: Student and Personal Features

Abstract

Two of the central concepts in teaching skills are decision making and pedagogical reasoning. Taking benefit from the dearth of studies on teachers’ actual or real-world decisions, this study aimed to respond to this invitation by keeping track of novice Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers’ decisions in two different times using six research-oriented teaching scenarios reflecting the student and personal features. Furthermore, their pedagogical reasoning was also attended to once through their responses to imaginary teaching scenarios and once through their actual classroom decisions. The participants comprised of ten novice Iranian EFL (six female and four male) teachers with an age range of 19 to 25 and a male experienced teacher, aged 30, who acted as a researcher-as-participant and was only accountable for the novices’ real-world reasoning. The data were collected through utilizing a total of six teaching scenarios, classroom observation, and video stimulated recalls. The findings, obtained through conversation analysis and pertinent vignettes and excerpts, revealed that the participants underwent a change in their decisions in two of the three scenarios reflecting the student features, while an approximate conformity could be observed in all scenarios mirroring personal features. It was revealed that whenever the teachers’ reasoning changed, their decisions underwent some changes as well. In addition, the findings showed that the flow of conversation in the classroom could be strongly influenced by the teachers’ decisions. A number of implications and recommendations for further research are also pinpointed.