teachers’ conceptions

Learner autonomy (henceforth LA) has become a buzz word in education in general and language education, in particular, for more than a decade now. Focusing on investigating Iranian EFL teachers’ conceptions of LA, the current study, taking a mixed method approach, attempted to illustrate how Iranian EFL teachers’ conceptions of leaner autonomy mapped out. To that end, 7 teachers, purposefully cluster sampled, were interviewed. After data saturation, the result of the interviews and the data gleaned from the literature were fed into the development of a questionnaire. The questionnaire, having being validated through a pilot study, was administered to 585 EFL teachers snowball-sampled, 2 of whom were, later on through negative case analysis, interviewed, and were required to provide the researchers with a narrative. Running a number of factor analyses, the researchers modeled the participants’ mindsets toward LA, which can be quite significant as it can have some theoretical and pedagogical implications, including, inter alia, situating LA promotion into the pedagogy of TEFL in Iran by running LA promotion workshops as well as developing a pool of LA promotion activities and software programs available to the stakeholders, especially the teachers.

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to examine teachers’ perceptions towards research by first investigating teachers’ conceptions about research and second, by examining the extent to which teachers read and do research. Methodology: To this end, the participants of the present study were 98 English language teachers from language institutes and schools. Utilizing Borg’s (2009) questionnaire, at first, the questionnaire responses were analyzed to determine the teachers’ view of research; in this section, the teachers were asked to point out to what extent they felt the activities described in 10 scenarios were or were not research. Findings: The results indicated that three scenarios were considered to be “probably research” and scenarios 4, 5 and 6 were regarded as “definitely research” by the participants. On the other hand, two scenarios were recognized as “definitely research”. The results of the second research question showed that among 98 English teachers only 24 teachers “often or sometimes” read published research which is a very high index. Teachers’ reasons for the answers to the second research question were lack of time, knowledge, access to resources, and institutional support. The findings of this research indicate that teachers’ conceptions of research are very near to conventional scientific theories. Only 12.2% of the teachers mentioned that they “do research”. Conclusion: the findings of the present study may be useful for teachers who want to promote their English teaching as such findings are suggested to improve their level of engagement in research activities, and consequently the quality of their research.