The Role of EFL Teacher Beliefs in Web-Supported Writing Instruction and Feedback Practices

Research on writing via computer-assisted language learning (CALL), particularly for learners of English as a foreign language (EFL), has documented a great number of benefits. Yet how teacher beliefs impact their practices in a web-supported learning environment has not been fully explored. This study is to investigate whether teacher beliefs lead to different approaches to utilizing blogs as a tool for a writing curriculum. Two Taiwanese teachers from two universities in central Taiwan were selected because of the co-created syllabus for implementing blogs as the web-supported writing tool in classes and the similar teaching activities that they utilized in process-oriented writing instruction. First, qualitative methods of in-depth individual interviews and a group interview afterwards were conducted for investigating teachers' beliefs. Then two retrospective protocols of teachers' feedback were also explored for their patterns of feedback provision, such as the frequencies of teachers' correction on students' errors as well as their feedback on the content-wise issues. The analysis of interview data identified four categories, namely 1) teachers' teaching in general, 2) teachers' feedback provision in different modalities, 3) teacher beliefs in error correction, and 4) teachers' beliefs in web-based feedback. Further analyses of both qualitative and quantitative data suggest that teacher beliefs in the treatability of errors contributed to their selective error correction. In addition, teacher beliefs in the feasibility of online teacher feedback varied greatly and led to their different adaptation of it. Furthermore, teachers' experience also mediated their implementation of feedback on error correction and content-wise issues. Finally, pedagogical implications of the study suggest the important role that teacher beliefs play in sustaining the practice of CALL.