TEACHERS’ STATED BELIEFS ABOUT THE USE OF ORAL PRESENTATION IN THE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM AND THEIR ACTUAL CLASSROOM PRACTICES

Abstract

This study examined (a) the consistency between teachers’ stated beliefs about the use of oral presentation in the language classroom and their actual classroom practices and (b) the learning opportunities that such beliefs and practices created for learners. To reach this aim, this study used a case study approach with pre-observation interviews, classroom observations, and then post-observation interviews as three main instruments to gather research data. Research participants were two Vietnamese teachers of English as a foreign language recruited from a university in Hanoi, Vietnam. Three interesting findings emerged from the collected data. First, in both cases, there was a high correspondence between the teachers’ stated beliefs about the use of oral presentation in the language classroom and their actual classroom practices. However, the stated beliefs and classroom practices greatly differed from one teacher to the other. So did the numbers of the learning opportunities that such beliefs and practices generated between the two cases. To date, this study was the first to investigate the learning opportunities that teachers’ stated beliefs and classroom practices might bring about. The three findings mentioned above suggested different useful implications not only for the use of oral presentation in the language classroom and but also for the language teacher education.