Socio-psychological context of teaching/learning English
Davoud Amini; Elnaz Kazemi
Abstract
Teacher's motivation originates from both teacher-internal and teacher-external conditions. This correlation-based study aimed to investigate Iranian EFL teachers’ motivational trend during their first five years of teaching in relationship to their personality type. Drawing on trait theory of ...
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Teacher's motivation originates from both teacher-internal and teacher-external conditions. This correlation-based study aimed to investigate Iranian EFL teachers’ motivational trend during their first five years of teaching in relationship to their personality type. Drawing on trait theory of personality and the big five personality framework, the research explores how novice EFL teachers' motivation during the first five years of career is influenced by personality traits. Participants in this study were 144 English teachers in Iranian high schools. The International Personality Item Pool-Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness Personality Inventory (IPIP-NEO) and the Factors Influencing Teaching Choice Scale (FIT-CS) were used to assess teachers' personality and motivation. Teachers' motivation showed a steady rising trend in the first five years of their career. Results revealed that conscientiousness and openness are significant positive predictors of teacher motivation, while neuroticism negatively impacts motivation. However, teaching experience did not significantly moderate the relationship between personality traits and motivation, indicating that other professional conditions may influence this dynamic over time. This study contributes to the literature by examining teacher motivation in a non-Western context, offering valuable insights into the dynamicity between the internal and external factors contributing to Iranian EFL teachers’ motivation within a complex dynamic systems perspective. The findings have practical implications for teacher recruitment, professional development, and retention strategies, emphasizing the need to consider individual personality traits in fostering long-term motivation and job satisfaction with ramifications at both individual teacher level and organization level.
L2 Creativity
Elnaz Zariholhosseini; Sajad Shafiee; Omid Tabatabaei
Abstract
Creativity is an essential prerequisite for teaching, developing, and promoting a foreign language. Pupils show enthusiasm for learning a foreign language in a creative environment. The central goal of this research was, therefore, to inspect the variety between experienced and novice English-as-a-foreign ...
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Creativity is an essential prerequisite for teaching, developing, and promoting a foreign language. Pupils show enthusiasm for learning a foreign language in a creative environment. The central goal of this research was, therefore, to inspect the variety between experienced and novice English-as-a-foreign (EFL) instructors regarding the interplay between their creativity and students' academic success. A closed-ended questionnaire was applied to inspect EFL experienced and novice teachers' promotion of creativity. Furthermore, the cumulative grade point average (CGPA) was applied as a substitute for measuring academic accomplishment. The questionnaire was distributed among 100 experienced teachers and 100 novice teachers in some branches of Gooyesh, Jahad Daneshgahi, and Sadr language institutes in Esfahan, Iran. In addition, their students' scores were gathered at the end of intended educational courses to calculate the classes' mean scores. Therefore, the data were analyzed descriptively and inferentially using frequency, percentage, Fisher's Z transformation formula, and mean. Besides, the Pearson correlation was utilized to gauge the connections between experienced and novice teachers' promotion of creativity and their students' academic achievements. The results confirmed the beneficial relationship between the creativity of experienced and novice instructors and students' academic performance. However, there was no significant disparity in the creativity levels of experienced and novice teachers.
Maryam Azizi; Hossein Heidari Tabrizi; Ahmadreza Lotfi
Abstract
Despite its enrichment, the literature on teacher self-efficacy lacks evidential data on the changes in both hidden and observable variables underlying this multifaceted construct. To compensate for this substantial gap, the current study compared patterns of cognition, metacognition, emotion, and behavior ...
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Despite its enrichment, the literature on teacher self-efficacy lacks evidential data on the changes in both hidden and observable variables underlying this multifaceted construct. To compensate for this substantial gap, the current study compared patterns of cognition, metacognition, emotion, and behavior across three groups of Iranian EFL teachers with scant, moderate, and considerable teaching experience. 382 Iranian EFL teachers participated in the current study, filling out five well-established survey instruments targeted at measuring pedagogical knowledge, teaching reflection, motivational needs satisfaction, teaching styles use, and work engagement. The survey data were compared across the three groups based on a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). According to the results, the groups differed significantly on a linear combination of the five variables. The discriminant function analysis (DFA) results showed that pedagogical knowledge and motivational needs satisfaction acted as a concordant pair and explained the heaviest load of the overall between-group differences. The significantly higher levels of pedagogical knowledge and motivational needs satisfaction among the moderately experienced teachers, compared to those of their less and more experienced counterparts, suggested that Iranian EFL teachers’ sense of efficacy reaches its peak in the middle years of teaching life. The findings may provide new insights into the ways of setting English teachers of various experiential backgrounds on the road to optimum efficacy.
Abdullah Sarani; Rasool Najjarbaghseyah; Mohammad Nasser Vaezi
Abstract
This study aimed at investigating the Iranian EFL teachers’ perceptions of critical pedagogy values in teaching English with an emphasis on gender and teaching experience. For that end, a 33-item Likert-type questionnaire was developed. The researcher-made instrument was administered to 102 EFL ...
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This study aimed at investigating the Iranian EFL teachers’ perceptions of critical pedagogy values in teaching English with an emphasis on gender and teaching experience. For that end, a 33-item Likert-type questionnaire was developed. The researcher-made instrument was administered to 102 EFL teachers teaching English in language schools in Qom, Iran. The internal consistency of the instrument was calculated through using Cronbach Alpha. It showed a high reliability (α=.88). The data was subjected to non-parametric Mann Whitney U test to check any potential significant difference between the levels of CP perceptions in the male and female EFL teachers. The results revealed that there was not a significant difference between genders in all items except item1 (p=.021), item18 (p=.017), item19 (p=.008), item 20 (p=.004), item28 (p=.000) and item 31 (p=.03) since the p value for these items was less than .05 (Pallant, 2005). The Kruskal Wallis test was also run to investigate if there were any differences in CP perceptions across four levels of language teaching experience. The test statistics revealed no statistically significant difference in levels of CP perception across four groups of EFL teachers in all items except item 18 (p=.034), 19(p=.025), 31(p=.01) and 32(p=.027) which were significant since the p value for them was less than .05 (Pallant, 2005). Then, the results of the study are discussed and some implications are presented.
