Learners’ beliefs

Research on the characteristics of effective EFL teachers integrates many constructs, which are treated independently in most cases. Consequently, the present study aims to explore the perspectives of teacher educators, teachers, and learners with regards to teacher effectiveness as an attempt to reduce the mismatches. To meet this aim, 34 teacher educators, 39 teachers, and 161 learners engaged in the context of university and language institute were selected on the basis of convenience and criterion sampling to respond to the 30 items on a 5- point Likert- scale questionnaire. The questionnaire comprised of items related to subject matter knowledge, teachers’ personal and interpersonal aspects, and approaches to language teaching. While the English questionnaire was distributed among the teacher educators and teachers, the Persian version of the questionnaire was handed over to the learners in the institute to be returned within a week’s time. Moreover, the questionnaire was available online to enrich the data collected. The ANOVA results indicated that the perceptions of teacher educators and teachers were quite similar, but were significantly different from the perspectives of the learners. Additionally, based on MANOVA analysis, it was revealed that the differences existed mostly in the category of ‘subject matter,’ whereas there was a strong agreement regarding ‘personal and interpersonal features’ of effective EFL teachers. The findings of the study may be fruitful for EFL curriculum developers, administrators, teacher educators, teachers and language learners.

Considering the facilitative role of corrective feedback in language learning, the impact of learners’ noticing on its effectiveness, and the significant contributions of individual attributes in learners’ noticing the corrective feedback, this study is designed to examine how learners’ implicit theories of intelligence (Mindset), an individual attribute, predict their preferences for oral corrective feedback (henceforth, OCF). A total of 143 Iranian EFL learners participated in the study. The participants were assigned to groups of fixed mindset (N=26) and growth mindset (N=26) based on their scores on Language Mindset Inventory (LMI) scale. The data obtained from the questionnaires were analyzed quantitatively. The results indicated that there were significant differences between the fixed-mindset and the growth-mindset groups in their beliefs toward some aspects of OCF. All in all, it can be claimed that language mindset (henceforth, LM) has a significant role in EFL learners’ beliefs about OCF. Pedagogical implications for considering learners’ LM in providing OCF are also discussed.