As I stated in Chapter 2, my study takes as one of its premises the fact that teacher cognition is accessible only indirectly and that its influence can be interpreted only when it is externalised through writing, talk and practice. Therefore, in designing the study, I hoped to get my participants to externalise their thinking, their attitudes and the roots of their teacher beliefs by asking them to engage in the three reflective interventions. I also presented them with a variety of reflective tasks, one of which was asking teachers to select their own reflective themes.

Writing in a recent special issue of the Modern Language Journal dedicated to the topic of teacher cognition, Kubanyiova and Feryok (2015) describe the importance of externalising teacher cognition in practice. They characterise teacher cognition research as an 'emergent sense-making in action', which offers an explanation of the relationships between what teachers think, what they do and what their students learn. They also indicate that teacher cognition research should attend to the 'ecologies of language teachers' inner lives' as they clarify 'what language teachers do, why they do it, and how this may impact how their students learn' (Kubanyiova & Feryok, 2015: 436).

My study does not follow the participating teachers back into their classrooms to trace changes in their specific teacher knowledge or thought as manifested in their professional activity.