Teacher Cognition
Why do teachers who believe in speaking still teach to the test?
Teacher cognition is what teachers think, know and believe, and how those mental constructs relate to what they actually do in the classroom.
Ask Mr Minh about language learning and he will tell you students learn by speaking. Watch his Year 11 class and you will see forty minutes of grammar explanation and exam practice. Is he inconsistent, or is something more interesting going on?
Teacher cognition is the field that takes such puzzles seriously. Simon Borg’s influential 2003 review defined it as what teachers think, know and believe, and the relationship of these to what they do. Drawing on mainstream education research, he mapped how teachers’ own schooling, training and working contexts shape cognition, and how cognition and classroom practice shape each other.
Gaps between stated beliefs and practice are common, and Borg’s review highlights context as a frequent reason: exams, syllabuses, class size and school expectations. Gaps can also arise between beliefs themselves. Simon Phipps and Borg (2009) followed three teachers in Turkey whose grammar teaching clashed with their beliefs about language learning but fitted deeper, more general beliefs about learning, which they called core beliefs.
A second shift came with what Karen Johnson (2006) called the sociocultural turn, building on her 1998 work with Donald Freeman. Teacher knowledge, she argued, does not simply sit in individual heads but grows as teachers take part in the social life of particular schools and classrooms. More recently, Magdalena Kubanyiova and Anne Feryok have urged the field to reconnect its research with how teachers create meaningful learning for students. For teacher educators, the lesson is that changing practice means engaging with what teachers already believe, including beliefs formed through the apprenticeship of observation and examined through reflection.
In actionA stated belief meets a context
- Observer
- You said speaking matters most, but today was almost all grammar. Why?
- T
- The end-of-term test is grammar and reading. Parents check the scores.
- Observer
- If the test changed, would your lessons change?
- T
- Probably. But I also think weaker students need the rules first.
An invented interview showing two layers: a contextual constraint, and a deeper belief about learners that would survive a change of test.
In the classroom
- 1
Write down three beliefs about how your learners learn English, then check one recorded lesson for evidence of each belief in what you actually did.
- 2
When a colleague’s practice seems to contradict their stated beliefs, ask what in the context or in their other beliefs makes the practice sensible.
- 3
In training sessions, elicit teachers’ beliefs before presenting a new technique and revisit them after they try it, including beliefs about what the exams reward.
Myth and reality
If teachers’ practice doesn’t match their beliefs, they are either confused or not telling the truth.
Belief–practice gaps are normal. They often reflect contextual constraints such as exams, or tensions between competing beliefs, and studying them is one of the main ways researchers understand how teachers reason.
Reflect
Which of your beliefs about teaching would you keep even if your exams, syllabus and class size all changed tomorrow?
Worth a minute before your next lesson, or a conversation in the staffroom.
SourcesChecked against Crossref and library records
Research on teachers’ thinking and decision-making grew in general education from the 1970s and reached language teaching in the 1990s. No single person coined the term, but Borg’s 2003 review consolidated language teacher cognition as a field and supplied a widely cited definition.
Borg, S. (2003). Teacher cognition in language teaching: A review of research on what language teachers think, know, believe, and do. Language Teaching, 36(2), 81–109.
Borg, S. (2006). Teacher cognition and language education: Research and practice. Continuum.
The book-length survey of the field, including how teacher cognition has been researched.
Phipps, S., & Borg, S. (2009). Exploring tensions between teachers’ grammar teaching beliefs and practices. System, 37(3), 380–390.
A clear case study of core and peripheral beliefs, showing why apparent inconsistency can make sense.
Freeman, D., & Johnson, K. E. (1998). Reconceptualizing the knowledge-base of language teacher education. TESOL Quarterly, 32(3), 397–417.
The landmark argument for putting the teacher as learner, and the social context of schooling, at the centre of teacher education.
Johnson, K. E. (2006). The sociocultural turn and its challenges for second language teacher education. TESOL Quarterly, 40(1), 235–257.
Explains how a sociocultural view changes what counts as teacher knowledge and how teachers learn.
Kubanyiova, M., & Feryok, A. (2015). Language teacher cognition in applied linguistics research: Revisiting the territory, redrawing the boundaries, reclaiming the relevance. The Modern Language Journal, 99(3), 435–449.
A critical agenda for the field’s next stage, asking how cognition research can matter to real classrooms.
ConnectionsSee it in the graph
- Reflective PracticeReflection is how teachers bring their own cognition into view.
- Exploratory Practicenot yet writtenPractitioner research that lets teachers investigate puzzles about their own beliefs and practices.
- WashbackExams are a classic contextual reason why practice departs from belief.
- Pedagogical Content Knowledgenot yet writtenOne influential model of the knowledge component of teacher cognition.
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