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.

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between elementary school students’ self-confidence in English as a foreign language and their assessment of English teaching taught by native speaker English teachers. A total of 126 elementary school students were asked on a 5-point Likert scale instrument to assess their native English teachers in terms of their teaching ability, provision of opportunity to use English, classroom management, and language assessment ability. In addition, the subjects were asked to rate how much they were confident with their English. All of the responses were submitted to the SPSS 22 version for statistical analyses. Firstly, the subjects were divided into 3 groups based on how much they felt confident with their English. Secondly, a MANOVA was run to investigate any group differences in how they perceive their native speaker teachers’ teaching ability, provision of opportunity, and language assessment ability. The results indicated that language confidence was indeed an important variable not only in subjects’ learning English but also how they perceived their English learning experience as a whole. Pedagogical implications for improving elementary school children were also discussed.

Youngcheol Kim and Jaewoo Shim. 2017. Discriminant Analysis of Satisfaction Levels with Native Speaker Instructors Held by Elementary School Pre-service Teachers of English. Studies in Modern Grammar 96, 235-251. The current study investigated the levels of satisfaction with native speaker teachers of English that were perceived by a group of elementary school pre-service teachers of English in a teachers college. 79 subjects responded to a Likert-type questionnaire with 15 items aimed to assess their satisfaction with their current and former native speaker teachers on their campus. The questionnaire measured the four aspects of teaching: the ability to teach, the ability to offer learning opportunities, the ability to manage and create friendly classroom climate, and the ability to assess their performance. The discriminant analysis was used to identify aspects that separated satisfied from unsatisfied groups of students. The results of the discriminant analysis showed that two independent variables (i.e., the native speaker teachers’ ability to offer learning opportunities and their ability to teach) were statistically significant variables in separating the two groups. These findings indicated that native speaker teachers of English need to make efforts to design lessons that may prompt active student participation, while keeping high levels of teaching ability congruent with students’ expectations.