Assessing Ideologies and Discursive Practices of Monolingual and Multilingual English Teachers in the EFL Classroom Context

Abstract

This paper presents the findings from ethnographic research that assessed and evaluated teachers’ classroom ideologies to actual classroom discursive practices in an EFL classroom context. The research focused on areas of teachers’ classroom ideologies and their classroom questioning patterns. It investigates the factors that influenced convergence and divergences of the teachers’ actual practice with ideologies. This study compared a set of multilingual and monolingual English teachers that are distinct in terms of their qualifications, experiences and language background. The findings indicate that both sets of teachers appear to have similar ideologies but do not apply these in the same way. The  teachers’ ideologies are not always applied in their classroom practices for a variety of reasons: some are related to the context of teaching while others are due to differences in experiences and personal backgrounds of the teachers.