Nobuhiro Kamiya

The influence of academic articles on an ESL teacher's stated beliefs

The current study investigated the relationship between one English as a second language (ESL) teachers encounters with three academic articles on the topic of oral corrective feedback (CF) and the impact that they had on his stated beliefs regarding CF. The teacher had 14 years of English teaching experience and an MA TESOL degree. Two semi-structured interviews were conducted, one before and one after reading the articles. Results suggest that the teachers stated beliefs about CF prior to reading influenced how he responded to the articles, in that he focused most on the findings and claims that coincided with his stated beliefs prior to reading. Namely, he agreed with statements and evidence that supported his belief in the effectiveness of CF, and he discounted negative claims about the use of CF. Reading the articles did not seem to facilitate a change in his beliefs regarding CF; nevertheless, the articles succeeded in raising his awareness of CF and caused him to reflect on a classroom practice that he had not considered for some time. The present study proposes the possibility of using academic articles for professional development even for experienced teachers.

The relationship between stated beliefs and classroom practices of oral corrective feedback

This study investigated the relationship between stated beliefs of four English as a second language (ESL) teachers about teaching and oral corrective feedback (OCF) and their actual classroom practices. The results show that their stated beliefs of teaching were found to be in accordance with their stated beliefs concerning OCF. While the most inexperienced teacher did not have any concrete ideas about OCF, the other three teachers had established varying degrees of stated beliefs. Nevertheless, they did not consider OCF as a primary tenet of their teaching; other elements were deemed as being more important. Their classroom practices were found to be largely in agreement with their stated beliefs about OCF in the sense that, following their common stated belief of teaching that creating a comfortable environment for students was crucial, they refrained from using explicit correction which could potentially humiliate learners, and instead opted for a more implicit type of OCF, recasts. Despite a general pattern of agreement between teaching statements and practice, one of the most experienced teachers demonstrated incongruent behavior between the two, indicating that teaching experience cannot be exclusively relied upon as an indicator of classroom practice.

The effect of learner age on the interpretation of the nonverbal behaviors of teachers and other students in identifying questions in the L2 classroom

This study investigated how learners’ ages affect their interpretation of the nonverbal behaviors (NVBs) of teachers and other students in distinguishing between questions and statements in the second language (L2) classroom. After watching 48 short video clips without sound in which three L2 teachers asked a question or made a statement with or without gesture, 36 elementary school pupils and 30 university students judged whether they thought the teachers asked a question or made a statement along with their reasons. The findings show that, regardless of learners’ ages, L2 teacher’s gestures were found to help learners better identify questions. Furthermore, the six major types of NVBs used for judgments most frequently were identical across the two age groups regardless of the accuracy of their judgments. Nevertheless, incorrect judgments were made as often and sometimes even more often than correct judgments by applying the same assumptions. The effect of age was evidenced in that the university students were able to use a larger number of NVBs for correct judgments, and better distinguish questions and statements without linguistic information than the elementary school pupils. The data suggest that it is the learners’ (L2) classroom experience that seems to be playing the major role in yielding this difference. The study indicates that adult L2 learners are better able than children to incorporate and interpret NVBs of teachers as well as other students quantitatively and qualitatively.