collaborative learning activities and communicative language teaching, their classes
are still teacher-centred, while they still put more emphasis on accuracy rather than
fluency. This inconsistency between the progressive beliefs teachers hold, and their
traditional classroom practices indicates, according to Anderson (1985), that, although
they might have acquired declarative knowledge concerning a number of issues (i.e.
knowing what), they have not yet acquired the necessary procedural knowledge
(knowing how) which would allow them to put theory into practice.
Question 3: Taking into consideration that a curriculum innovation is under way,
which involves the publishing of new course books, the question which arises is
whether the beliefs teachers hold will allow them to use the new books according to
the specifications of the new curriculum or will they use them according to the way
they themselves consider appropriate.
What has been refereed to so far in this section, in addition to the finding that,
for many teachers, the planned curriculum is invisible (Nunan 1988a: 138), has a
number of implications concerning its effective implementation. This is because the
individual beliefs teachers hold make them have a rather intuitive knowledge of what
to teach, and how to teach it, which informs their practices. This can be a reason why
they consider essential to supplement the official teaching material with exercises
which focus exclusively on the mastery of decontextualised grammatical items,
despite the fact that the present curriculum conceives language ‘… as a social act
rather than an independent system of structures and meanings’ (Dendrinou, et. al
1997: 72). In this way a mismatch is created between what is planned and what is
actually being implemented which not only renders the present curriculum incoherent
(Johnson 1989), but also raises the question of how ready these teachers are to
implement a prospective innovation. Johnson (ibid) emphasises that when the official
curriculum differs radically from a teacher’s beliefs about teaching and learning, what
happens in the classroom is likely to conform to an ‘alternative’ curriculum’ which, as
it is incompatible with the aims and means of the official programme, it usually
produces unsatisfactory outcomes.
3.2.2 Suggestions for an effective in-service training programme
As the answers to the research questions indicate, despite the fact that there are
many teachers who have participated in a number of in-service training programmes
on how to teach Young Learners (see appendix IV, p. 111, tables 8 and 9), these
programmes have not been successful in helping them change either their beliefs, or
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