Mismatches between teachers' expectations and students' performances

Abstract

This paper draws from a larger study that examined the structuring of language lessons (Tragant 1994), that is, how teachers set the stage for activity and how they bring activity to a close. One major observation in that study was that there were times where what the teacher told students to do differed from what some students ended up doing in their groups or individually. The present article intends to present, classify and interpret the instances where that mismatch occurred. The data consists of eighteen transcripts from three undergraduate EFL classrooms at a major university in Spain. The analysis of the data points to three types of mismatches (simplified performances, adapted performances and overworking behaviours) and relates them with a number of aspects of the activity (i.e., the linguistic requirement and the activity-type) and with the instructor's teaching style.