Language learners’ learning and development, being two of the most important outcomes of foreign language education, are also influenced primarily by teachers’ teaching styles. This is attributed to be the behavioral reflections of teachers’ cognitive conceptions of learning and teaching. Research on teaching suggests that it is crucial to uncover teachers’ cognitions for the reason that teachers’ mental processes are considered to be the underlying sources behind their instructional approaches, attitudes, decisions, policies, behaviors, strategies, and so on. All of these are linked in some way to their learners’ learning and development. In this respect, focusing on pure classroom practices without considering teachers’ cognitive accumulations could lead to shallow information about whichever educational issue is being investigated. Therefore, by examining the patterns of the relationships between the two, this paper draws attention to both language teachers’ cognitions on language learning processes and the actions they follow during their language teaching practices.
Teachers interpret a teaching situation in the light of their cognitions on learning and teaching, and this interpretation guides their decisions and attempts to create effective teaching in the classroom. The developments in cognitive science provide us with a model with three components: (a) the classroom events and actions, (b) the planning that precedes those events and actions, and (c) the understanding and interpretation that follow those events and actions (Woods, 1996).As teaching is a kind of cognitive activity, the concept of teacher cognition is itself broad and encompassing, because there is a set of distinct concepts and multiple perspectives regarding the cognitive processes occurring in human. Cognitions are described by Borg (2006) in terms of “instructional concerns or considerations teachers have, principles or maxims they are trying to implement, their thinking about different levels of context, the pedagogical knowledge they possess, their personal practical knowledge and their beliefs” (p.87).
In view of the fact that understanding teacher cognition is of great importance to understanding teaching and teachers, it is equally critical to understand possible sources of teacher cognition and how those cognitions are constructed. Woods (1996) claims that language learning experiences, early teaching experiences and education courses potentially influence teachers’ beliefs about and approaches to teaching. Borg (2003) illustrates that professional coursework, classroom practice, schooling and contextual factors add to the formation of teacher cognition. Likewise, Gabillon (2012) lists the factors contributing to belief formation and development as life experiences in society, prior schooling, professional education, and teaching experience. Experience, as attached importance, ought to be discussed in terms of three phases: (a) early experiences in schooling, (b) experiences during teacher education, and (c) experiences obtained from actual classroom practices.
In the last four decades, educational researchers have given due consideration to the investigation of teachers’ mental lives through a variety of concepts like teacher belief, teacher knowledge, teacher thinking, teacher perception, teacher assumption, teacher value, teacher principle, teacher philosophy, teacher maxim, and so on. Although some of them have had more emphasis attached while others have been studied and reported in a limited number of papers, all of those concepts have been treated as an extension of teacher cognition. Teacher cognition is a broad concept which, “encompasses what teachers think of, know about, believe in, and understand from an educational issue as well as its relationship to classroom practices” (Öztürk & Yıldırım, 2015, p. 171). From this point forth, this study focuses on the way language teachers think of, know about, believe in, and understand from language learning and its link to language teaching practices.