The global spread of English has led many classrooms in the post-colonial contexts that teach English as a second and foreign language to pursue monolingual ideologies and to hire expatriate monolingual teachers. Monolingual teachers are posited to pursue more efficient teaching styles and classroom practices than the local teachers. However, there is very little evidence to support this claim. The few studies that have to date investigated teaching styles either did not focus on the teachers' beliefs or their classroom practices and they did not systematically compared different types of teachers in the same context. Although teachers' ideologies are deemed to be influential in shaping their classroom practices, not many studies have examined teachers' ideologies and its interconnection in classroom practices. Using ethnography multiple case studies design, this study investigates two types of teachers' classroom practices and ideologies. It particularly seeks to understand whether, a.....

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Skills of reading and comprehending in English are crucial for academic success in schools. Pupils with low reading ability skill may result in obtaining low grades and poor test scores. Traditionally pupils are taught to lift specific information as a reading strategy to answer comprehension questions, comparatively, this study uses retelling strategy to evaluate pupils' understanding. Past research indicated that retelling strategy enhances accuracy and greater comprehension. Thus, far study that investigates effectiveness of this strategy remains scarce in Malaysian English as Second Language (ESL) primary schools. As reading skill starts to develop in early stage of schooling, it is deemed necessary to conduct this study among primary level pupils. The present study specifically analyzes the effects of written retelling strategy on pupils' understanding of story structure among year three primary school pupils in Malaysian ESL classroom. A quasiexperimental research design with pre.....

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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. Keywords Assessment, teacher ideologies, discursive pra.....

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