Native-speaking English teachers’ instructional actions and pedagogical knowledge
This study examined native-speaking English teachers’ pedagogical knowledge through the analysis of transcriptions of videotaped lessons and interviews with six novice English teachers teaching at middle schools. The goal was to discover what pedagogical knowledge these teachers have and how the knowledge was represented in the form of instructional actions. The dominant categories of the teachers’ instructional actions were repetition of input and instructions. Hence, there were a lot of repetitions of input which seem to come from behavioristic perspectives of language learning and teaching. Also, there were lots of teacher-initiated questions and directives to elicit responses from the students. The primary way of clearing the meaning of the text was translation. The findings indicated that the native-speaking teachers’ pedagogical thought are mostly pertinent to general educational knowledge not about language learning and teaching. In addition, the novice teachers’ pedagogical knowledge deduced from pedagogical thoughts leaned towards heavily to ‘Handling language items’ while experienced teachers in Gatbonton’s (2000) study displayed no dominant category. Implications for teacher training were discussed.