Exploring the Professional Beliefs of an EFL Teacher: A Narrative Inquiry

There has been a shift away from modernism to post-modernism and from black-and-white logic to fuzzy logic. While modernism and black and white logic presuppose certainty, post-modernism and fuzzy logic presuppose uncertainty. Aligned with this shift, in language education, there has been a shift away from method to post-method. However, in language education research the quantitative mode of inquiry is still the dominant mode, especially in EFL contexts such as Iran. The researchers and educators working within this paradigm believe that there is a unidirectional relationship between theory and practice. But in line with the recent paradigm shift, there has been a shift away from grand theories towards grounded theories, i.e., theories of practice, and this paves the way for a bilateral relationship between theory and practice. In other words, just as theories improve language teaching practice, language teachers' stories conceptualized and theorized through narrative inquiry have the potential to improve and modify aspects of theories proposed by educationalists. Within this new paradigm, theory improves practice and practice improves theory. Despite these shifts and due to the dominance of the applied science model of teacher education, there is a dearth of data-driven studies which aim at theorizing practitioners' practice. Narrative inquiry, as a systematic way of recording and making sense of professional experience, helps researchers to theorize professional practice and develop theories of practice, which complement the dominant grand theories. Theory-driven studies aim to improve language teaching practice by providing the field with findings which are supposed to be universally applicable. In practice, however, these findings are of very little use since the results: 1) are presented in terms of very complicated and daunting statistical procedures which make them incomprehensible to a vast majority of practitioners; 2) are inconclusive, that is, while one study verifies a hypothesis, the next study rejects the very same hypothesis. Moreover, they inculcate the idea that researchers, who are at times alien to the teaching practice, know teaching better than the practitioners themselves. Narrative inquiry is a move in the opposite direction since: 1) it is in search of meaning rather than generalizable quantifications; 2) it gives voice and theorizes practitioners' experience rather than imposing something on classroom reality. Literature Review According to Richardson (1996a), beliefs are "psychologically held understandings, premises and propositions about the world that are felt to be true" (p. 103). Other scholars believe that teachers' pedagogical thoughts and practices are shaped by their personal subconscious beliefs (Borg, 2006; Williams & Burden, 1997). Some scholars have tried to differentiate between knowledge and beliefs. For instance Woods (1996) believes that beliefs are more likely to be subjective and implicit, while knowledge tends to be objective and explicit (Woods, 1996). Similarly, Fenstermacher (1994) conceptualizes knowledge as factual propositions and beliefs as personal values. But there remains a question, "where do these subconscious pedagogical beliefs come from? Scholars have specified several sources such as teachers': * experiences as learners (Kennedy, 1991); * educational biographies as learners (Borg, 2005); * knowledge arising from teacher education (Borg, 2005); While teachers' knowledge can change as a result of reflection and professional experience, their beliefs are a bit harder to change. While professional knowledge enlightens practice, it is teachers' professional beliefs that directly shape their practice. As noted by Shavelson and Stern (1981), what teachers do in the classroom is said to be governed by what they believe and these beliefs often serve to act as a filter through which instructional judgments and decisions are made. …