Towards an Understanding of Teachers' Mediation in English Language Teaching in the Primary Schools

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This small-scale study aims to investigate how primary teachers of English perceive their role as mediators with regard to English teaching. Thus, it examines the teachers' current mediation principles and their perceived practice. This study also sets out to gain an in-depth understanding of further issues which emerged from the dissonance between the teachers' beliefs and their perceived practice of mediation.
In order to conduct the research, a mediation questionnaire was adopted from Williams and Burden (1997), and another open-ended questionnaire was constructed to obtain the qualitative data from 22 participants who are teachers of English and are in a Master's degree program. The results of the study reveal that generally teachers hold and exercise their own beliefs regarding their role as mediators.
However, they do not put some of their principles into practice. A number of significant factors were found to be responsible for this, these are: unfavorable teachers' working conditions, dedication to the national curriculum, and their awareness of certain mediation principles. Some particular areas needing further investigation were identified in the last part of the study.