Teacher cognition and teacher expertise

In recent years, teacher expertise has become an important agenda of teacher cognition research ( Li, 2017 ). In this paper, I will focus on exploring teacher cognition and teacher expertise research in EFL contexts, where language teacher cognition is still a relatively young but important domain of inquiry. Expertise, according to Dreyfus and Dreyfus, is the ability of ‘knowing how’ to use knowledge one has to deal with cognitively demanding problems rather than ‘knowing that’ knowledge in decontextualised situations (1986: 4). In this chapter, I will provide a survey of the field of teacher cognition, focusing on the development of language teacher cognition research and approaches to the investigation of teacher cognition. I then move on to explore the construct of teacher expertise, drawing on theoretical and practical understanding of expert and novice. Extracts of data are used to illustrate how expertise is distributed and multiple, highlighting the main issues in teacher education, as well as in researching teacher cognition. The following section will focus on practical issues relating to implications of teacher cognition in developing effective pedagogy and reflective teachers. Particular attention is paid to future research and practice in raising teachers’ awareness of their own thinking, believing and doing in professional contexts, and as well as ways of developing teacher expertise.