Academic Degree

A lot of studies have been done in the developed countries due to the importance of job satisfaction; however, only a limited number of studies have been conducted on English teachers' job satisfaction in Iran. Therefore, this study has been designed to recognize the amount of job satisfaction among Iranian EFL teachers regarding their gender, academic degree, and major. To do this end, both qualitative and quantitative research methods, a questionnaire, and a structured interview were utilized. To collect data, a validated questionnaire which was developed by Karavas (2010) administered to a sample of 53 males and females English teachers, teaching in different institutes, at private schools, and at universities in Genaveh Port, Bushehr Province. After gathering the questionnaires, all of the teachers were interviewed. The study findings provided the evidence that females were more satisfied than males. Moreover, the results indicated that the participants with BA/BSc significantly had higher job satisfaction than the participants with MA/MSc degree. But the comparison between the other groups did not reveal any significant difference. Furthermore, the findings clearly demonstrated that there is no significant difference between teachers' job satisfaction and their major. The results of the interview revealed that Iranian EFL teachers satisfied with their jobs because they like teaching, and the most important reason of all teachers' job dissatisfaction is their low salary.

The study investigated EFL teachers’ current level of critical consciousness as well as their beliefs about the educational context where they taught. The study also explored how gender, teaching experience, workplace, and academic degree differentiated the participants with regard to their critical consciousness. Drawing upon the related literature and the existing questionnaires in the field, we designed and validated a questionnaire applying technical statistical procedures (e.g., confirmatory factor analysis). The questionnaire was then completed by 310 English teachers teaching in different language institutions across the country. The findings revealed that, in general, EFL teachers’ current level of critical consciousness was above average. However, they believed that the educational context did not encourage and cultivate in them critical consciousness. It was also found that, contrary to expectations, the academic degree did not differentiate teachers in this regard. Moreover, male and female teachers were found not to be significantly different in their critical consciousness. The theoretical and pedagogical implications are discussed in the paper.

The present mixed-method study examines the effect of Iranian EFL teachers’ teaching experience and academic degree on five dimensions of reflective teaching. In this line, a 29-item Likert scale Reflective Teaching Questionnaire composed of practical, metacognitive, critical, cognitive, and affective dimensions was administered to a convenient sample of 142 male/female B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. EFL teachers with 4-30 years of teaching experience. Moreover, a semi-structured interview was conducted with 16 EFL teachers yielding more in-depth triangulated data on their reflection levels and the related problems. The MANOVA results indicated the significant effect of teachers’ experience and academic degree on their reflective teaching with the least effect reported on the affective dimension. The results indicated significant interaction of the two research variables with the dimensions of reflective teaching. Moreover, the interview results indicated that lack of time, prescribed syllabi, and ineffective teacher training programs were the main obstacles of reflective teaching. The findings may bear implications for Iranian curriculum developers, materials writers, teacher trainers, administrators, and EFL instructors.

The well-established affiliation of metadiscourse research tradition to the philosophy of ESP raises some inevitable expectations on how much and how well the concept has been geared to meet the practical necessities of academic writing pedagogy. In light of such an expectation, a corpus of 35 academic writing coursebooks published during the last three decades were evaluated in terms of the possible realizations of key resources of interaction in pedagogical tasks. Due to its theoretical rigor and analytically operationalized nature, Hyland’s model of metadiscourse (2005a) was taken as the guiding framework for the current evaluation. The quantitative findings emerging from the analysis of the corpus did not sound sufficiently promising, suggesting that that theoretical developments have not yet been ideally translated into pedagogical designs; however, the rich range of resources identified in the tasks (i.e. the fifty five categories emerging from the evaluation of the corpus) suggest that the rigorous tradition of research in metadiscourse has contributed to the effective operationalization of the concept for pedagogical objectives. It has been argued that through the effective introduction of the concept of metadiscourse into pedagogical designs and its appropriate operationalization, novice participants of academic/scientific discourse communities would be enabled to redefine the nature of academic communication and get rid of a large number of misconceptions which have become fossilized through long years of the dominance of a positivistic thinking.

This study was an attempt to examine the relationship between the academic degree and teaching experience of Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers and their reliance on student engagement. To this end, eight EFL teachers (male and female) with different teaching experiences and academic degrees and a number of 40 students in their respective classes were selected through convenience sampling. First, the teachers and the students filled out consent forms, including their personal information, such as gender, age, academic degree, and years of teaching experience. Second, the students answered Skinner et al.'s (2008) 'Engagement vs. Disaffection with Learning: Student-report' Questionnaire, a valid scale for measuring language learners' engagement with teaching-learning tasks and their satisfaction with their learning activities. Then, Pearson's product-moment correlation between teachers' teaching experience and academic degree, as well as the students' self-expressed ratings of their engagement or disaffection with classroom learning activities, was calculated. The results showed significant positive correlations between teaching experience and behavioral and emotional engagement and significant negative correlations between teaching experience and behavioral and emotional disaffection.