Teaching cognition and teaching philosophy in EFL training teachers

Abstract

Teaching cognition analyzes teachers’ concepts about teaching, emphasizing their beliefs, which affect the instruction process. This well-known field of knowledge, already established three decades ago, still lacks more studies on EFL training teachers’ beliefs. This study analyzes 17 teaching philosophies from students of the “English Didactics” course from the Master’s program in Teacher Training at CEU San Pablo, a private university in Madrid. This corpus has been analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The texts have been processed through Sketch Engine, an online corpus manager. Moreover, students’ philosophies have been divided into 3 main categories according to the training teachers’ didactic experience: those who had worked at language schools, private tutors, and no experience at all. Thus, this study will help to get to know better training teachers’ beliefs in terms of the definition of teaching/learning, the teacher’s role, the student’s role, teaching methodology, and the evaluation.