This thesis reports the findings of a study which investigates the beliefs and classroom practices in grammar teaching of four ESL teachers in Hong Kong. A review of the literature is presented to show that while teacher cognition in formal instruction has attracted increasing research attention in recent years, a number of issues are not yet fully explored. In particular, relatively little has been written about teacher cognition in school settings where English is taught by non-native speaking teachers to large classes of students, who are in the classroom to learn the language simply because they are required to (Borg, 2003). This study aims to make a contribution by shedding light on this area of enquiry. It also aims to examine why teachers may hold conflicting beliefs, and how culture shapes the ways in which teachers think and act.
The four participants of this study are all Chinese teachers who teach English as a second language in Hong Kong secondary schools. Using case study methodology, the study involves indepth interviews with the teachers, classroom observations, audio recordings of the teachers' lessons, stimulated recall techniques, copies of materials used by the teachers, samples of student work, interviews with students, and metaphors generated by the teachers.
A key finding is that as the teachers have different professional training and teaching and learning experiences, they each espouse a unique system of beliefs. The teachers are not aware of all of their beliefs at the same time, and some beliefs may come to the fore of their awareness while others may recede into the background. This conceptualization of the "structure of awareness" helps to explain why some of the teachers in the study hold conflicting beliefs.
As the beliefs of the four teachers exhibit differences, their classroom practices also diverge. In terms of how they provide formal instruction, the four teachers can be placed on a continuum. Some teachers choose to