1. Applied Linguistics (Language Teaching and Learning)
Mehdi Mehranirad; Foad Behzadpoor
Abstract
The field of language teaching has recently witnessed a resurgent wave of interest in the value of educational research and its impact on teachers’ practice. Consequently, various strands of inquiry have commenced to investigate the relationship between research and practice. Within these discussions, ...
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The field of language teaching has recently witnessed a resurgent wave of interest in the value of educational research and its impact on teachers’ practice. Consequently, various strands of inquiry have commenced to investigate the relationship between research and practice. Within these discussions, however, the opinions of teachers are mostly ignored or reflected only circumstantially. The purpose of this study was to take teachers’ views about research on board by exploring the extent to which they use and conduct research as well as the barriers that may hinder their research engagement. To collect data, a survey questionnaire was designed and validated through soliciting experts’ opinions and conducting factor analysis. The questionnaire was then administered among a large sample of Iranian English teachers. Participants’ responses showed moderate levels of research engagement among English teachers. Results also indicated that four categories of barriers can best account for teachers’ lack of research engagement: problems related to the nature and quality of research, restrictive educational policies, lack of systematic partnership, and problems associated with the use of research in educational settings. The findings suggest that the research-practice division is the result of a complex interaction of an array of factors that cannot be simply reduced to technical matters. Thus, reconfiguration of the gap requires multidimensional strands of development in research and practice communities as well as in educational policies.
Foad Behzadpoor
Abstract
Second language (L2) teacher education has witnessed a substantial shift of attention and orientation with regard to the way it looks at teaching, teachers, and various teacher-related factors. This consequential drift began to occur in the 1970s, a decade branded by Freeman (2002) as the decade of change ...
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Second language (L2) teacher education has witnessed a substantial shift of attention and orientation with regard to the way it looks at teaching, teachers, and various teacher-related factors. This consequential drift began to occur in the 1970s, a decade branded by Freeman (2002) as the decade of change where teacher education was in the van of the quest for a cognitive paradigm, in lieu of the behaviorist tradition, in which the mental lives of teachers were also taken into account. The shift has continued in an evolutionary fashion, and teachers, couched within the new tradition, are deemed to be both cognitive actors and reflective practitioners. As a reflective being, a teacher is also viewed as “an agentic social ‘subject’: individuals with identities, knowledges, and experiences who are themselves engaged in an evolving trajectory of professional development” (Cross, 2020, p. 38). As a corollary of this teacher repositioning, the notions of agency and, by implication, language teacher agency (LTA) have become a regular fixture of inquiry in both mainstream and L2 teacher education. To be sure, in terms of theorization, the construct is still in need of clarification as there is no univocal consensus on what exactly constitutes agency (Mansouri, et al., 2021). Moreover, it is sensible to consider whether agency is merely another fashionable concept in the language teaching enterprise with no positive and useful contribution to the realities of the teaching practice, or whether teachers’ involvement with agency will lead to the betterment of their professional development practices. Language Teacher Agency is a well-timed publication making a crucial contribution to these concerns.
