Introduction: From Practices to Principles

Abstract

Research on teaching and teachers in the field of general education has refocused somewhat over the recent past to what teachers actually do. In other words, research has started to examine the different ways in which experienced teachers understand their practice in relation to their accumulated career experiences by listening to their voices and getting their views (Hargraves, 1996). This research with rather than on teachers now includes the teachers’ understandings of their profession with the idea that teachers can be generators of research rather than always being consumers of research by others (see also research approach later in this chapter). In English language teaching, Freeman (1996) has pointed out the importance of listening to teachers’ voices about what they do because he says that it is necessary to put teachers at the centre of telling their stories. Freeman (1996: 89) maintains that putting teachers in front and centre in terms of listening to what they do actually follows the jazz maxim: “You have to know the story in order to tell the story”. That said, not much has really happened in the English Language Teaching (ELT) field as we have not heard many of the voices of experienced English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers and their various experiences over their years of teaching ESL.