An Interview Study on a Primary School Teacher's Perspectives on ESL Teaching

An Interview Study on a Primary School Teacher's Perspectives on ESL Teaching

The main purpose of this interview study is exploring a teacher's perspectives on her role as an ESL teacher in the setting of an elementary school in New York, USA. Since most current research on teachers' beliefs has been done without considering the teachers' teaching contexts, the current study applied a contextual approach to investigate an insider's perception on ESL teaching. Based on the data from six times of interviews, ten times of class observation reports and documentary analysis, the current descriptive investigation finds three recurring themes: the teacher believed that providing positive classroom environment was the most important role as an ESL teacher although her belief in the power of comfortable classroom milieu caused occasional discipline problems. The teacher's ways to implement her belief emerged as two additional themes: (1) she had short-term and long-term teaching plans to be extremely flexible to teach multi-age-level, multi-English-level students who came from multi-ethnic backgrounds, and (2) she communicated with her students' parents whenever needed because she believed parental engagement was crucial to teach her children successfully. Some implications drawn from the study findings are added for future research and for Korean parents.