Classroom Ideologies and Teaching Practices of Native and Non-native English Teachers in EFL Classrooms

This paper presents the findings of two different sets of teachers’ classroom ideologies and actual teaching practices. It compares a set of native and non-native English teachers that are distinct in terms of teacher training background, qualifications and experiences. This study explores the divergence and convergence of the teachers’ ideologies to their actual implementation in classroom. It investigates the factors that lead to the convergence and divergence of the teachers’ actual practice than their claimed ideologies. The findings of this study reveals that both sets of teachers do share the same classroom ideologies but do not apply those ideologies in a same way. The variations between the teachers exist for a variety of reasons, factors such as nature of training, classroom context, experiences of the teachers and their backgrounds have a great influence on teaching practices.


Introduction
Research in the field of second language education that examined teachers' beliefs about teaching and classroom practices reported teachers no longer perceive teaching as a structured and pre-planned activity.In contrary, teaching is perceived as spontaneous decision making that is based on the activities that arise during lessons (Borg, 2003).Teachers' decision making in the classroom is heavily influenced by a set of ideologies that teachers hold about students and pedagogical practices (Farrell & Bennis, 2013).These ideologies have shown to influence teachers' choices concerning what to teach, how to teach, and how to deal with learners' behaviours (Borg, 2003).Fundamentally, various actions by teachers in the classroom teaching practices are not random or neutral, but rather reflect their personal values and beliefs (Verloop et al., 2001).Hence, teacher ideologies are fundamentally derived from their individual philosophies of teaching.Past research has indicated that teachers action in classroom is heavily influenced by their ideologies (Andrews, 2003).Consequently, a considerable amount of research (Liu, 1999;Nayar, 1994;Paikeday, 1985;Tsui & Bunton, 2000;Widdowson, 1994) has been conducted in the area of teachers' ideologies in language classrooms, however they are confined to investigate teachers' ideologies and rarely explored teachers' actual classroom practices to determine the influence of teachers' ideologies in their actual teaching practices.This study intends to assess two different sets of teachers' classroom ideologies; the native and non-native teachers, to evaluate the implementation of the teachers' ideologies in their classroom practices and to investigate the factors that influence the implementation of their classroom ideologies.First it assesses teachers' classroom ideologies by using a set of interview questions.Second it evaluates the implementation of the teachers' ideologies in their classroom practices by observing their actual classroom teaching.Third it investigates the factors that influence the convergence and divergence of the teachers' classroom ideologies to their actual teaching practices by comparing the interviews conducted with the teachers and their classroom teaching assessment.The findings indicated that there is a difference between the native and non-native teachers on the implementation of ideologies in their actual classroom practices.This study identified few aspects that lead to the difference among the two sets of teachers, such as teaching experience and language backgrounds of the teachers.Although the findings provide insights into the native and non-native English teachers' classroom ideologies and practices, it is not generalizable to similar context due to limited samples of teachers involved in this study.

Teachers' Classroom Ideologies
Ideology refers to belief systems.It is a form of belief or societal structure which influences our practices (Kroskrity, 2010).This system is shared by members of a group or society rather than being a feature of a single individual (ibid, 2010).This does not, however, mean that a certain ideology is necessarily shared by all members of a society or group.In fact, members of the same society may have competing sets of beliefs.For example, teachers in the same educational system may have different views about pedagogical practices.Ideology functions to organise and control other socially shared beliefs and associated actions (Eagleton, 1991).For instance, an educational ideology may shape and control beliefs about a teaching style, including student participation, types of activities, seating arrangements, and other classroom related matters.These views in turn guide people's actions in these contexts.Ideologies are world views that an individual, group, or society holds to be important or true, these views are shared by a society and form the basis for how it should function (Schieffelin, 1998).Ideology underpins perspectives on issues, actions, and behaviours of a social group.It influences the ideas that a society or an individual holds towards a certain issue, such as language or teaching.
The term "ideology" has been "characterised in a variety of ways, in a confusing tangle of common-sense and semi-technical meaning" (Woolard, 2004, p. 293).Despite its complex nature, ideology as a concept has been used across a variety of disciplines such as linguistics, where people have talked about language ideologies in general, and also in detail (ibid, 2004).Although the term ideology has been appearing in language studies, ideology as a concept has not been much theorised in education.In fact, the term ideology is simply referred to as beliefs about teaching and often overlaps with language attitudes in educational research (Tsui & Tollefson, 2007).Research on language attitudes in education tends to explore an individual's beliefs, but pays less attention to shared beliefs and politics of language as in the case of language ideologies.The term language ideologies in classroom studies tries to capture "the implicit, usually unconscious assumptions about language and language behaviour that fundamentally determine how human beings interpret events" (ibid, 2007, p. 26).The concept of language ideologies in the classroom is not limited exclusively to language use, but also mediates between language and broad social structures and categories, such as speaker's gender, nationality, and sociocultural background, as well as beliefs about language practices.
The study of language ideology has received much attention in sociolinguistics and anthropological research.Research on language ideologies, variously referred to as language ideology, linguistic ideologies, or ideologies of language, investigates how speakers rationalise their language use, including linguistic forms and discursive practices (Kroskrity, 2010).However, over the years there has been little agreement as to "what exactly the concept of language ideologies should mean as a theoretically organising unit of investigation" (idib, p. 84).The classic definition identifies "language ideology" as a "set of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalisation or justification of perceived language structure and use" (Silverstein, 1979, p. 193).Language ideologies are rooted in the social practices of people.It does not only refer to people's ideas, notions, or representations of language, but also to the practices through which they are enacted (Kroskrity, 2010).That is, when people are engaged in language practices such as classroom instruction, they are simultaneously displaying their beliefs about the nature, function, and purpose of language use.Language ideology postulates that there is an inextricable link between language use and the broader historical and institutional practices, values, and interests (ibid, 2010).
To date, most studies of teachers' classroom beliefs practices have focused on exploring the classroom beliefs of the teachers' (Liu, 1999;Nayar, 1994;Paikeday, 1985;Tsui & Bunton, 2000;Widdowson, 1994).They show that only a limited number of studies have focused on the actual teaching practices of the teachers.Yet other studies that investigated teachers' teaching practice have shown that they did not explore the teachers' teaching ideologies.Essentially, there are no studies that have examined how teachers implement their teaching ideologies in actual teaching practice.Thus, the present study intends to fill the existing gap in the field of teachers' classroom ideologies and classroom practices.

Methodology
The present study employs an ethnographic approach that emphasises observation and analysis of situated practice.The ethnographic fieldwork for this study involved classroom observations and semi-guided interview sessions.The ethnographic approach provided insights into classroom practice from both the teachers' and researcher's perspectives.The classroom observations made it possible to capture genuine classroom events, meanwhile the semi-guided interviews with teachers provided insights into participants' perspectives on their classroom practices.
Data collection took place for the duration of eight weeks.Several sources of data were collected for each teacher participant: a pre-observation background survey interview, six three-hours of non-participant observations and an hour interview post observations.In total each teacher participated in one and a half hour interview sessions and eighteen hours of classroom observations (three hours each session).
The classroom observation served as a primary data source for this study as it records teachers' actual practice in classroom.All the observed lessons were video recorded and transcribed.The researcher also took field notes about the classroom interaction it enables to provide additional information from the researchers' perspective.Meanwhile, the semi-structured interviews probed teachers' ideologies and allow researcher to access teachers' perspectives of classroom events.Two interview sessions were conducted with the teachers, the first session explored the teachers' ideologies in relation to their classroom discursive practices, and the second session seeks clarification from the teachers on the divergence of their ideologies and actual practice.It provides a ground for the teachers to examine their ideologies, and reflect its implementation in their classroom practices.In addition it also allows the teachers to share their perspective about the divergence of ideologies and practice.The interview ensures that the researcher does not simply impose her own interpretations of classroom practices.
Findings from the two different sources were validated through a data triangulation process (Miles & Huberman, 1994).Both classroom observation and interview transcriptions were checked more than once to ensure the accuracy and consistency of the transcription.This was to ensure that no important information was missed during the process of transcribing.The ideologies that were obtained from the interviews and teachers' actual practices in the observations were summarized into charts; an assessment of the interview and observation data shows the convergence and divergence between the teachers' ideologies and actual classroom practices.

Context and Participants
Four teachers participated in this study.All the teachers teach adult foreign learners that come to learn English as a foreign language in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.The learners come from various part of the world however, majority of them are from neighboring Asean countries such as Indonesia, China, South Korea, and Vietnam.The students' proficiency level ranges from lower intermediate to intermediate.That is, generally they are able to read and write but have limited fluency and communication ability.
I will refer to the teacher participants by the following pseudonyms: Sam, Chris, Eileen, & Pinky.The native English speakers both do not have any teaching qualifications in the area of English language teaching.Chris hails from Northern Ireland and holds a degree in fashion design while Eileen comes from Britain and possesses a degree in English literature.Chris & Eileen had taught English in a number of Asian and European countries.The second group of teachers, Sam & Pinky, are non-native teachers and English is a second language for the teachers.Both of them are trained English teachers and hold a degree in Teaching English as other Language (TESOL).Teaching experience of all the teacher participants varied in between 2-8 years.The major difference between the teachers is that Sam & Pinky are trained non-native teachers while Chris & Eileen are expatriate native speakers of English.

Findings
This section discusses the results of this study.It argues that different sets of teachers have slightly different sets of ideologies and the implementation of ideologies in the teachers' discursive practices varies due to several external factors.The discussion of the findings is organized in three sections.The first section explores teachers' ideologies in the interviews data.Second section discusses the teachers' classroom practices and the final section assesses the teachers' ideologies and actual classroom teaching practices.It evaluates the implementation of the teachers' ideologies in their classroom practices.

Teachers' Classroom Ideologies
The interview conducted with the teacher participants explored the following aspects of teachers' ideologies on classroom practices; questioning, and feedback/repair following questioning.Most of the literature on classroom discourse and ideologies indicates that questioning is an important aspect of classroom discourse.Questions have a dual function they function to elicit information and to construct knowledge.Classroom questioning is one of the common ways to encourage participation from learners.Questioning in classroom is often categorized into two types; display and referential.Teachers ask referential questions to seek unknown information, while display questions elicit already known answers.Questions that begin with how and why are examples of referential questions, and usually these types of questions genuinely seek information from the students (Wragg, 1983).Who, what, where and when are the patterns of display questions.In a similar vein, there is a widely held assumption that a teacher's job is to reduce learners' errors and guide learners towards the ideal language form (Gass & Selinker, 1992).The error correction ideology postulates that accepting learner errors and failing to provide feedback are ultimately bad teaching practice (Tollesfon, 2000) and thus feedback is perceived to be an important aspect of classroom practice.
Questioning is perceived as an important aspect of classroom teaching by all the teacher participants.All four teachers agree that questioning plays an important role in stimulating participation and it helps teachers to evaluate the progress and language development of the learners.Although they all agree on the effectiveness of questioning in advancing learners' language development, the teachers expressed a preference for different kinds of question practices to accomplish certain kinds of results.Both Pinky & Eileen stated that they prefer to use display questions to promote communication during lessons, meanwhile Chris & Sam prefer referential over display questions.They maintain that display questions inhibit students' language development as it only tests their level of comprehension.By contrast, referential questions are believed to enhance student's language development and enhance the learning process (Miller, 2002).Even though, Pinky & Eileen also felt that referential questions are important, they generally do not use them as they believe the students are not sufficiently proficient to handle referential questions.Sam & Chris argue that tasks, including questions, have to be commensurate with learners' language capabilities and proficiency, hence posing certain types of questions to learners is considered unfair.Thus some teachers pick types of questions according to proficiency level while others according to cognitive functions.In fact, they generally avoided asking students with lower proficiency questions because it will embarrass the students and undermine their confidence to participate in others classroom activities.On contrary, Pinky beliefs that every student in her classroom must contribute to the language learning and teaching process.She facilitates this by selecting questions according to students' strengths.She asks challenging questions, such as referential question to students with more capability and easier ones to students with lower proficiency.
Despite the teachers' enthusiasm for implementing questioning sequences in their classroom in order to encourage student participation and further language learning, the teachers differed with regard to student selection in questioning.The teachers expressed different views about student selection for answering questions.Both Pinky & Sam stated that they prefer to nominate individual students for answering their questions rather than allowing students to self select because it allows pitching questions to each student's ability.Pinky remarked that, in a classroom with beginner learners it is difficult to expect the learners to self select.In order to ensure the functionality of lesson, she thus calls upon individual students to answer the questions.In contrast, Chris & Eileen believe in student choice and typically practices "open floor questioning".They maintained that calling on individual students' by name may lead to embarrassment if the particular student is not able to provide an answer.This preference for open floor questioning appears to be due to a personal preference because Chris stated that, "...if I am the student, I would definitely dislike for the teacher to call my name and ask me to provide an answer when I am not ready to do it".He further remarked it is important for a new language learner to build confidence in using the language, as a teacher we must accommodate to their pace and allow them to individually participate than forcing it upon them.
With regard to feedback and repair in classroom practice, all the teachers agree that effective language learning and teaching can only be achieved by providing feedback to students and correcting their mistakes in learning the language.All the teachers agree that both positive and negative feedbacks are equally important as it helps students to become aware and address their mistakes.The teachers regard feedback tends to provides immediate response as the teachers are able to witness the students correcting their mistakes.Although all teacher participants agree that oral feedback tends to be more powerful, they expressed different views about how to effectively address students' incorrect responses in the classroom.Chris & Sam shared their concern about students' if incorrect responses are corrected publicly in front of other learners.Both teachers believed that public discussion of individual learner's mistakes is shameful for the learners.Sam mentioned that it would be more appropriate to repair students' mistake individually as students will pay attention to their mistakes and strive to improve.He further asserts that correcting students immediately and directly to their face might defeat the purpose of correcting as the fear and embarrassment will cause the students to not fully understand the corrections made by teacher.Both Sam & Chris prefer to implement an incidental corrective strategy in which only hints are given to the student, such as repetition of the learners' incorrect responses and to subsequently discuss the error in private.Pinky & Eileen did not agree with their views.They argued that students' mistakes must be corrected immediately as it provides students with better opportunities for improvement.Both of the teachers insist that explicit and immediate repair is the most effective strategy.Eileen remarked, "...classroom is a place to learn your mistakes, if the students commit an error then it must be corrected immediately, moreover students can't get away from making errors so there should be embarrassment to the students".In addition, Pinky stated that, covert and delayed repair will not lead to fruitful results.
Teachers also have different ways of delivering the message to the students.Chris argued in favour of a face sensitive approach which he referred to as the "sandwich technique".It combines both positive and negative feedback to deliver the message.He explained that repair should not be delivered bold on record but should be layered in between positive remarks.The teacher should first highlight a student's strengths before pointing out any weaknesses.Sam concurred with Chris' point of view as he also felt that bold on record repair strategies are likely to threaten student's positive face.Alternatively, Pinky & Eileen remarked that positive and negative feedback should be handled separately.Both teachers asserted that students should be praised for positive efforts and their mistakes must be treated separately.They further maintain that, mixing positive remarks to deliver negative feedback may cause confusion on behalf of the students.Eileen noted that "…some concepts take longer to acquire and praising and correcting the error is often not successful, especially in the case of fossilized errors".Both teachers stressed that positive and negative feedback should be clearly distinguished and it must be used solely to serve its purpose.For Pinky accuracy is important in language learning and thus error correction will be beneficial only when it is addressed specifically to the mistakes in order to enhance accuracy.She further stated that if error correction is mixed with positive feedback it will undermine the entire repair process as it can lead to confusion for the learners.Eileen and Pinky believe that positive feedback is important to the students as it motivates and encourages language learning and development, "praise them for a correct answer but don't mix it up with error correction".

Table 1. Teachers' ideologies statements
As the table indicated, to certain extend teacher participants practices were not congruent with their held beliefs.There were both convergence and divergence of beliefs in their actual classroom practices as discussed below;

Chris's Ideologies and Practices
Overall, Chris's ideologies tend to diverge with his classroom practices but there were also some instances where they converged as well.Although Chris stated that he assigns different types of questions to students according to their proficiency levels, in reality he seems to provide equal opportunity to all of his students.He frequently asked asks questions in a circle.He started the first question with the student sitting in the front row and continued asking questions until he reached the students on the last bench.Thus, in most of his lessons the majority of the students were given a chance to response to the questions.
Chris seems to depart more from his ideologies in feedback than in questioning.According to the interview, Chris's top priority was not to publicly embarrassed students.For example, Chris said, "...high confidence level is very important for a learner, I try to be very cautious not to make any of my students shameful as for me learning comes along with pride".It is possible that Chris is a little bit over concerned with students' freedom.Maum (2002) pointed out that native teachers tend to be more concerned about avoiding threatening students' face when making pedagogical decisions than with teaching aims and best practice.In actual practice he was observed not to live up to his ideologies though.In several instances, he immediately corrected student's mistakes, clearly pointed out their mistakes and provide an explanation and he did not implement his 'sandwich' corrective strategy at all.

Eileen's Ideologies and Practices
Eileen was observed to diverge from her ideologies in questioning and providing feedback/repair from several perspectives.Eileen stated that she uses both types of questions and focuses to use more of referential questions as it challenges students' cognitive level.In actual Eileen was observed not to use any referential questions, her questioning patterns were focused on closed question and even with display questions she does not probe further for the students to elaborate their answers even though there were many opportunities to do so.Similarly, she diverged on the questioning techniques.She relied quite heavily on individual nomination than open floor questioning.Eileen said she doesn't force a question on a student by naming students however she was not able to practice open floor questioning in her lessons as she expressed in the interview.
In a similar vein, Eileen's feedback/repair mechanism too was quite divergent as her questioning approach.Eileen's ideologies and practices were converged pertaining to whole class correction and in providing positive feedback.Eileen was clear to indicate students' error directly and ensure she does not confuse the students by providing positive feedback along with negative.As she expressed, "…students have the rights to know how to fix their mistakes, so I will explicitly tell them when error is committed and ensure I don't beat around the bush by saying things like you are good but so and so".However, she was observed to diverge in fixing errors as what she expressed during the interview.Eileen does not provide continuous feedback as there were several instances when errors were not corrected but only hints were given to indicate the errors.When errors were not corrected, Eileen only echoed the errors and leaves it as it was.This diverged with her belief that errors must be fixed immediately by providing explanation.Additionally, Eileen rarely praises her students for positive response as what she claims to do.

Sam's Ideologies and Practices
Generally, Sam's ideologies tend to converge with his classroom practices but there are also few instances where they diverged.With respect to Sam's ideologies about questioning, all his ideologies and practices converged.Sam stated that his preferred questioning structure was the "teach-test" approach and in line with the former he implemented continuous questioning throughout the lessons and ensured he choose the right student to test through individual nomination.Perhaps the most strongly divergent practices from Sam's ideologies are pertaining to error correction.He stated that he is a big proponent for students' comfort that he makes sure not to point out errors directly or make it as a whole class correction.However in practice, he was observed to pay attention in accuracy as he corrected mistakes immediately and frequently echoed the mistakes and corrected it clearly and loudly.In these instances, he appears not to be congruent with his ideologies that are immediate and whole class corrections are shameful and need to be avoided.

Pinky's Ideologies and Practices
Overall, Pinky's ideologies and practices tended to converge in her classroom practices.A minor fraction of divergence was observed in Pinky's questioning and feedback patterns.With respect to questioning, Pinky was observed to use a large amount of referential questions along with display questions as her choice of questions.
However, in the interview she was against of using referential questions especially among her students who possess low level of proficiency.Interesting many of her students were able to provide answers for the referential questions even though she held the ideologies that her students are not capable to handle challenging questions.
Indicating errors explicitly was the top priority of Pinky as she expressed, "…students are not capable to identify their own mistakes unless you point it out clearly to them, I don't see any usefulness of only giving hints rather than fixing it right away".In fact departing from her ideologies at few occasions appeared to be motivated by her desire to provide opportunity to self-correct prior to being told the answer.During these instances, Pinky was observed to challenge a particular group of students to self-correct by giving hints, but she did not practice the same with other students.Pinky's divergence in this particular aspect could be to test particular students who possess higher ability than her average students.This is because she was observed to use implicit corrective strategy only with selected students.

Discussion
Result from this ethnography study seems to strengthen the review that teachers' ideologies and actual practice are not congruent during many instances in their classroom practices.According to Senior (2006) experienced and trained teachers are likely to have more expertise and experientially informed ideologies than teachers with no any pedagogical training.In a similar vein, Gatbonton posits that principles or ideologies of trained teachers are likely to converge with teaching practices, as training is paramount to pedagogical decisions (2008, p. 173).
Similarly, this study adheres to the principle proposed by Senior, 2006;Gatbonton, 2008 studies.With regard to the former, Pinky and Sam, the non-native trained teachers, tended to practice what they said they would to a greater extend although there were a small number of divergences.The incidental divergence of their teaching practice especially with regard to error correction can be explained due to issues arising in the classroom.Throughout the interview after the classroom observations Pinky continuously stressed how teaching decisions were constrained by incidents that occur spontaneously during lessons.On numerous occasions, she stated that as a teacher she needs to accommodate to the situation and religiously stick to her plan in her decisions as classroom events occur naturally.Since the students show different level of participation for every lesson she has to continuously change her question preference to test students' comprehension.She further mentioned that although the students were placed in the beginner's level, in actual fact the classroom comprised students of various levels of proficiency.She thus needs to challenge those students with better proficiency to keep them engaged with the lesson.In a similar vein, Sam's divergence in his error correction technique could be explained by time constraints within a lesson that refrain him from practicing his ideologies fully in his teaching practices.In fact, in the post observation interview Sam constantly expressed how time constrain influence his classroom decisions especially in the beginner's classroom.Although he believes in individual and implicit error correction he was not able to implement his techniques as he had to encompass a lot of information in a lesson.If he chooses do practice his ideologies he will not be able to cover the syllabus within the stipulated time.A study conducted by Farrell & Lim (2005) raised the similar concern of trained and experienced teachers pertaining to time constraints.
In the case of untrained native teachers, although the results tended to be more divergence than convergence between the ideologies and actual classroom practices this could not be determined clearly as both teachers were observed to experiment different feedback and questioning approach throughout the lessons.That is, their classroom practices are not continuous and tend to change from lesson to lesson.The lack of expertise in making pedagogical decisions would suggest for the lack of stability between their ideologies and classroom practices.Since both teachers were not trained on classroom teaching approaches and methodologies, the teachers were observed to test various techniques before forming stable and continuous patterns of classroom discourses.According to Gatbonton (2008) untrained and inexperience teacher's ideologies tend to change exceptionally as they had fewer opportunities to revisit the pedagogical methodologies and approaches and draw a generalization as the trained teachers.Although the former, might not appear to be true for all inexperience and untrained teachers, it tended to be possible in the case of Eileen especially pertaining to the feedback/repair category.Eileen expressed that error correction is not shameful and in fact it is an important part of classroom teaching.However Eileen was constantly monitored to neglect student's error, she did not provide feedback or acknowledge an error was committed, in fact very minimal hints were given to the students to indicate the error.In the case of Chris, although he diverged from his ideologies in many instances but his divergence seems to be helpful in his actual practice from several ways.He stated that he does not provide equal opportunities to his students and only practices open floor questioning.In actual he was in contrary to his ideologies, and his diverged practices were beneficial for the students as he ensure everyone was given opportunities during all his lessons.Similarly in feedback/repair category his divergence was beneficial for the students as he clearly pointed out students' mistakes and provides explicit explanation on the mistakes which enhances students' understanding.According to Basturkmen (2012) it is possible for in-expertise teachers of not being sure of their ideologies as they are still in the process of forming.Following that, it is possible that Chris's practices and ideologies vary to a certain extend due to his inexperience in verbalizing his ideologies.In addition, Chris has the least years of experience than other teacher participants hence the lack of experience too may have caused hindrance for him to verbalize his ideologies in the interview and being unaware of his actual practices.This was the first interview and classroom observations for all the teacher participants pertaining to their ideologies and classroom practices.Despite several years of teaching practice, in general all the teachers were seem not be conscious of their ideologies and practices as this was prevalent during the interview; long hesitation and time was spent in conveying their ideologies.Farrell & Bennis (2013) mentioned that it is indeed a problem to examine teachers' ideologies as it always remains hidden for the teachers and efforts are needed to bring awareness to it.Generally, when chance is given to express ideologies on teaching and learning, subsequently teachers realize that their ideologies are far from simple.Thus, if teachers consciously think about their language teaching ideologies, they could actually form awareness about their tacitly held ideologies and further be cautious if there is any gap between what they belief they are doing and what the students are receiving in actual.Fundamentally, assessing teacher's ideologies and actual classroom practices of trained and untrained teachers can help to shed light on how teachers can adjust their ideologies and further improvise their teaching techniques and approaches in order to enhance their practices.

Conclusion
This study assessed the ideologies of teachers corresponding to their classroom practices.It investigated the practices of two trained non-native and two untrained native teachers in an English academy in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.The findings of this study indicated that there were divergence and converge of ideologies and practices among all the teachers.However the trained teachers seemed to be less diverged than the untrained teachers.While the divergence can be associated as a reaction to the natural occurrences of classroom context where teachers need to accommodate to the needs of the classroom, the greater divergence of the untrained teachers suggests there is distinctiveness between trained and untrained teachers.Even though the small sample of teachers involved in this study limits generalization of the findings to similar contexts, it still enables to gain an understanding into the factors that differentiate the teachers' classroom ideologies and practices.The purpose of assessing the classroom ideologies and practices of native and non-native teachers is not to determine the best practice or compare the teachers but to understand to what extend the training and experience of a teacher can influence their pedagogical decision that further impact the teaching and learning process.Hence it is clear that training is important to teachers of any descendent, both to a native and non-native teacher.