An Investigation on the Impact of EFL Teachers’ Epistemological Beliefs on their Teaching Practices / Performance. The Case of Teachers at the Department of English at Tlemcen University.

Abstract

A significant amount of research was dedicated to personal epistemology. However, research on teachers’ epistemological beliefs is quiet scarce. The current study investigates the impact of EFL teachers’ epistemological beliefs on their teaching practices. To reach this end, the researcher opted for an exploratory case study dealing with fourteen EFL teachers in the English department at Tlemcen University. The results revealed that teachers possess a combination of naïve and sophisticated beliefs to various extents. Moreover, it was indicated that effective teaching practices are primarily related to more sophisticated beliefs and lastly, the findings clearly showed that adopting for a complex epistemological belief system is one of the best ways to acquire compelling teaching performance.