Language Teaching Research Quarterly

Teachers are constantly involved in the act of decision-making in every moment of the classroom. These decisions are underpinned by pedagogical reasoning, which entails situated knowledge about particular teaching episodes and is reconstructed through teaching practice. The present case study sought to explore the pedagogical reasoning skills that novice English language teachers use in making classroom decisions. Results from a combination of lesson plans, classroom observations, and semi-structured interviews revealed that novice teachers applied their pedagogical reasoning to achieve syllabus objectives and deal with learners' misbehavior. In the absence of previous teaching experiences, they did not tend to reflect on the decisions they made to deal with learners' learning and their teaching. They also lacked consistency in their reasoning process, disrupted by their changing beliefs about learning and teaching. These findings imply the need for the improvement of teachers’ pedagogical reasoning through teacher education programs.