Abstract:
ELT has recently witnessed a shift away from a method-bound orientation and toward a post-methodic view of teaching English. Consequently, the focus of some second language teacher education programs has shifted toward sociopolitical aspects of ELT (Miller, 2004) and its contributions to reinforcement or transformation of the status quo (Kumaravadivelu, 2003a). Yet, in many countries, including Iran, ELT teacher education has maintained a relatively method-bound focus on technical dimensions of teaching English and has avoided adopting a critical and sociopolitical approach to ELT. In order to investigate the ways in which teacher education as currently practiced*Email address: prsnaseri @yahoo.comCorresponding Address: English language department, Faculty of ForeignLanguage Payame Noor University, Kohandezh St, Isfahan, Iranfacilitates or stifles implementation of postmethod in ELT, the present study explored English teachers’ perceptions of the dominant approaches to teacher education in ELT centers in Iran and their ideological and pedagogical bases. To this end, 23 language teachers were interviewed about the logistics, content, and procedures of the teacher education programs they had attended. The analysis of the interviews, as directed by grounded theory, yielded three themes, namely no/little teacher learners’ involvement in course design and implementation, dominance of a transmission model, and dominance of a linguistic and technical focus.
Machine summary:
comCorresponding Address: English language department, Faculty of ForeignLanguage Payame Noor University, Kohandezh St, Isfahan, Iran facilitates or stifles implementation of postmethod in ELT, the present study explored English teachers’ perceptions of the dominant approaches to teacher education in ELT centers in Iran and their ideological and pedagogical bases.
Keywords: Ideological barriers; Method, Pedagogical barriers; Postmethod; EFL teacher education Introduction Various methods of (second) language teaching have been proposed and used during the previous 20 years (Richards & Rodgers, 2014), especially in the 1970s when the "method boom" (Stern, 1985, p.
Kumaravadivelu (1992) also proposed a framework consisting of 10 macrostrategies, such as maximizing learning opportunities, facilitating negotiated interaction, and fostering language awareness in order to help teachers become more sensitive to classroom events and activities and, as a result, develop the capacity to generate varied and situation specific ways of teaching.
In some cases, for instance, at the end of the program, student teachers are asked to answer some questions about theories of second language teaching, which do not necessarily engage them in thinking about the theories and concepts critically, analytically, and in light of their experiences (Nezakat-Alhossaini & Ketabi, 2010).
Therefore, the major research question directing this study was "What approach to teacher education dominates EFL instruction in Iran as perceived by EFL teachers, and what are its pedagogical and ideological bases?" In the following section, the participants, the data collection process, and the data analysis procedures are discussed.