Exploring the Relationship Between Core French Teachers' Beliefs and their Instructional Practices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this doctoral dissertation, I explore the relationship between beginning Core French (CF) teachers’ beliefs about Core French teaching and their instructional practices. As a former teacher educator, one of my principle preoccupations was the challenge faced by many of my Core French teacher candidates (TCs) to enact practices aligned with their beliefs. In order to explore this topic, I gathered data via an on-line questionnaire on the beliefs and declared practices of 47 Core French teachers in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). By means of in-class observations, I collected detailed information on the actual practices of 13 Core French teachers, nine beginning and four experienced for comparison. In addition, I interviewed these 13 teachers to assess their impressions of their teaching. In the literature, conflict or incompatibility between teacher beliefs and non-traditional second language teaching approaches, such as a communicative approach, are regularly cited as a key factor contributing to discrepancy between beliefs and practices. However, the incompatibility of beliefs and practices did not in my view adequately explain what I had witnessed as a teacher educator. In analyzing my data through the lens of a hybrid framework of complexity theory and Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy, I found teachers’ ability to handle periods of chaos, which almost inevitably accompany the introduction of a new instructional approach, to be the key factor contributing to discrepancies between beliefs and practices. Moreover, teacher levels of self-efficacy had important implications for how teachers viewed and navigated the chaos. Participants with a high degree of self-efficacy viewed and navigated the chaos quite differently than participants with a low degree of self-efficacy. Findings also show important differences in outcome (e.g., teacher and student use of the target language) in classes taught by teachers with a high degree of self-efficacy versus those with lower levels of self-efficacy. Dans cette thèse, j'explore le lien entre les croyances des enseignants de français langue seconde (FLS) et leurs pratiques pédagogiques. En tant qu'ancienne formatrice d'enseignants de FLS, une de mes préoccupations principales c'était d'aider mes étudiants à assurer une convergence entre leurs croyances et leurs pratiques. Afin d'explorer ce sujet, j'ai fait la collecte de données par questionnaire sur les croyances et pratiques actuelles de 47 enseignants de FLS dans la région de Toronto, Canada. J'ai également observé 13 enseignants de français cadre (FLS) en salle de classe et effectué des entretiens semi-directifs après les observations. La recherche dans le domaine présente souvent l'argument que ce sont les croyances des enseignants qui les empêchent de progresser, d'adopter des pratiques pédagogiques non-traditionnelles telles que l'approche communicative et l'approche actionnelle. Pourtant, ceci ne correspondait pas à ce que j'avais observé en salle de classe. En analysant mes données à travers un cadre théorique hybride innovant composé de la Théorie de la complexité et la Théorie de l'auto-efficacité de Bandura, je démontre que c'est la capacité d'un enseignant de gérer des moments de chaos/d'instabilité occasionnés par un changement de pratique qui joue un rôle déterminant. La capacité de gérer le chaos est influencée par le niveau d'auto-efficacité de l'enseignant. Les enseignants qui ont un niveau plus élevé d'autoefficacité naviguent le chaos diffèremment des enseignants qui ont un niveau moins élévé. Ceux qui ont un niveau plus élevé réussissent à naviquer le chaos à ce que leurs pratiques restent fidèles à leurs croyances. Plus important encore, c'est qu'il y a des différences notables entre les résultats d'enseignement/d'apprentissage.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".