An Analytic Generalization of the Path Model of Teacher Cognition: Evidence from a Case Study on the Teachers’ Beliefs and Practices

This instrumental-comparative case study examines the beliefs and classroom practices of three English teachers in Iran. The participants were observed for two consecutive classroom sessions and interviewed two times afterwards; the first time two days after the final observation and the second time, in the form of stimulated recalls when the data from their observations were analyzed. The observations pro vided insights about their classroom practice, and the semi-structured interviews elicited their language teaching beliefs. The findings suggested that (A) learners' condition directs teachers' choice of methodology; (B) the washback effect of high-stakes discrete-point examinations along with the traditional ongoing societal beliefs, notwithstanding the sense of a good-will for helping learners to be successful in future, can misinform teachers' communicative practices; (C) pre-service teacher education in the form of graduate programs in TESOL seems to be not much effective in helping teachers to readily implement communicative classroom practices. These answers corroborated the statistical findings of the Path Model of Teacher Cognition (Nishino, 2012) within another context, and empirically justified the rational for a move towards contextualized knowledge-base of teacher education.