چکیده:
This instrumental-comparative case study examines the
beliefs and classroom practices of three English teachers in Iran. The
participants were observed for two consecutive classroom sessions and
interviewed two times afterwards; the first time two days after the final
observation and the second time, in the form of stimulated recalls when
the data from their observations were analyzed. The observations pro-
vided insights about their classroom practice, and the semi-structured
interviews elicited their language teaching beliefs. The findings sug-
gested that (A) learners’ condition directs teachers’ choice of methodol-
ogy; (B) the washback effect of high-stakes discrete-point examinations
along with the traditional ongoing societal beliefs, notwithstanding the
sense of a good-will for helping learners to be successful in future, can
misinform teachers’ communicative practices; (C) pre-service teacher
education in the form of graduate programs in TESOL seems to be not
much effective in helping teachers to readily implement communicative
classroom practices. These answers corroborated the statistical findings
of the Path Model of Teacher Cognition (Nishino, 2012) within another
context, and empirically justified the rational for a move towards con-
textualized knowledge-base of teacher education.