Leila Tajik; Sara Pakand Ahmadi; Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini
Abstract
Given the significant role of studying history in casting light on the past and present of events and providing future insight, the present study aimed to investigate the history of English teacher preparation programs offered in five famous private language institutes established in the second post-revolutionary ...
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Given the significant role of studying history in casting light on the past and present of events and providing future insight, the present study aimed to investigate the history of English teacher preparation programs offered in five famous private language institutes established in the second post-revolutionary decade (about thirty years ago) in Iran. Precisely, the study investigated the past and present of the programs in terms of their internal aspects as well as their response to external or sociopolitical associations of English language teaching (ELT) from their establishment. Two administrators, nine TPP (teacher preparation program) designers who were also teacher instructors, and two teachers were purposefully sampled. Data was gathered through conducting semi-structured interviews, in addition to analyzing documents available on the website of the institutes and those provided by the participants. Analyzing data through phronetic iterative approach manifested the related history in terms of five constant features including methodological directions as content, transmission approach in teacher preparation, providing teachers with external opportunities for professional development, insisting on monolingualism in ELT, and disregard for bringing the inclusion of local culture in ELT to the attention of prospective teachers, as well as three major changes comprising inclusion of teaching practice (TP), inclusion of technology education for ELT purposes following the outbreak of covid-19 pandemic, and enhancement of TPP duration. Specifically, the constant features disclosed lack of attention to external association of ELT in designing the programs while the major changes exhibited their internal development. Findings have implications to develop teacher preparation programs based on postmethod pedagogy.
Monir Ghasemi Mighani; Massood Yazdanimoghaddam; Ahmad Mohseni
Abstract
Developing intercultural communicative competence in EFL learners is one of the most recent aspects of language competency that aims at equipping learners with appropriate attitudes and skills to be able to interact more effectively in culturally-diverse settings. The current study was an attempt to ...
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Developing intercultural communicative competence in EFL learners is one of the most recent aspects of language competency that aims at equipping learners with appropriate attitudes and skills to be able to interact more effectively in culturally-diverse settings. The current study was an attempt to explore the development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) of a group of English majors and investigate what aspects of ICC explicit teaching could improve.Thus, an intercultural course was designed and implemented through an academic semester. A questionnaire of intercultural communicative competence was administered before and at the end of the semester to find out any possible significant change in the ICC level of the participants. The study also explored if there was any correlation between language proficiency of the participants and their level of ICC. The results of the study indicated that the overall ICC level of the learners increased significantly through the intervention of the intercultural course with the most significant rise in behavioral, cognitive and affective dimensions of the construct respectively. The results showed that there was not any significant correlation between language proficiency and the overall level of intercultural communicative competence; however, regarding the components of ICC some differences were found across two groups. The results of the study have implications in teacher education programs, teaching methodology, curriculum and materials development and the assessment of the ICC construct.
