Thai EFL University Teachers’ Beliefs and Practices in Relation to Teaching Speaking Skills

It is now widely accepted that teachers’ beliefs have a great influence on teachers’ practices and investigating the sources of teacher beliefs and the relationship between beliefs and practices can be beneficial for professional growth. Despite work on teachers’ beliefs in aspects, such as the teaching of grammar, limited research has been carried out to date on the aspect of the teaching of speaking skills (Borg, 2003; Yue’e & Yunzhang, 2011). The current study is one of the first to explore teachers’ beliefs and practices in the area of teaching speaking skills in the Thai EFL context. It investigated six Thai in-service EFL university teachers’ beliefs and practices in relation to teaching speaking skills, the sources forming their teachers’ beliefs in relation to teaching speaking skills and the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and practices. A qualitative research design was employed with a multiple case study following an iterative approach. Semi-structured interviews were used at two stages along with non-participant observations and stimulated-recall interviews. The participants were selected through a purposive sampling method, which selected teachers with responsibility for developing their students’ speaking skills. Findings indicate that teachers’ beliefs and practices were consistent in terms of traditional approaches, such as linking the development of speaking skills with an explicit grammar focus, based predominantly on controlled practice. Moreover, beliefs such as following native English speaker models (Snodin & Young, 2015), were also transferred into their practices. Consistent with many previous studies, experiences as learners and teaching experiences were the most important sources of teachers’ beliefs. At the same time, the findings indicate that teacher education programmes and continuing professional development were not particularly influential in terms of beliefs or practices. The findings reveal that the participants’ core beliefs, their self-efficacy beliefs, and their sense of responsibility beliefs were a predictor of their classroom practices. However, instances of divergence between teachers’ beliefs and practices were also observed and found to relate to both internal factors and contextual factors. Internal factors included core and peripheral beliefs, contradictory beliefs, and a limited teaching knowledge, whereas the contextual factors included students’ low ability, time constraints, teaching materials and negative washback. Thus, there are important implications for educators to revisit their curricula and to improve the design and content of their training courses and teacher educational programmes to match these teacher needs in order for beliefs to better correlate with best practices in the field.