مطالب

Teachers pose different perspectives toward teaching. Some teachers share this attitude that teaching is just a job and a sole source of income, while others believe that teaching is a vocational and moralistic career associated with love, commitment, and devotion. This study, in the form of a qualitative grounded theory approach, aimed to deeply investigate the interrelationship of data emerged from teachers’ perspectives toward teaching as profession to develop a model in this regard. Therefore, twenty-six Iranian English teachers, teaching at schools and Farhang language institute, were requested to share their ideas as to how they view teaching as a profession. A semi-structured interview, in three sessions with 20 participants and focus-group interviews with 6 participants were conducted. Based on Corbin and Strauss's (2014) systematic steps for grounded theory, the data then transcribed and codified. The findings ended with an eight-factor model containing 40 categories. The factors include: a) source of income, b) decreasing motivation, c) poverty and inclination to become a teacher, d) insufficient salary, e) deteriorated quality of teaching, f) experience, g) society negative attitude, h) dissatisfaction. The proposed model opens a new window for teachers and reminds the government educational policymakers, training centers, ministry of education, and those who care about quality education and students’ academic achievements to observe income inequality, and salary differentials, increase teachers’ social status, and motivation, facilitate difficult working conditions, reduce resource wastage, support teachers appropriately, decrease teachers’ financial concerns, terminate the sense of socioeconomic inequality, and speak out the voices of marginalized teachers.

This study aimed to determine the university students’ level of social presence, preferred synchronous learning tool, and learning performance and their differences according to sex, age, year, major, Blackboard experience, and perceived computer literacy. The relationship between students’ social presence, preferred synchronous tool, and learning performance was also determined. The respondents were 29 students enrolled in the ESL online elective class, Global Business Communication, at a university in South Korea. There were two sets of online surveys used in this study. The statistical tools used in this study were the mean, Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test, Mann-Whitney Test, and Kruskal-Wallis Test. The results showed that the students maintained a Moderately High level of social presence throughout the duration of the course, chose KakaoTalk as their preferred synchronous learning tool, and concluded the course with an overall average grade, or learning performance level of “B”. There was a significant difference regarding the students’ learning performance when they were classified according to Blackboard experience; and no significant relationship existed between the students’ social presence, preferred synchronous tool, and learning performance.