levels of reflection

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.

In today's society, it is important for teachers, particularly foreign language teachers, to understand that reflectivity is considered as a main factor in growing teaching profession. This study sought to examine the different dimensions of reflective teaching among Iranian EFL teachers considering the variables of gender, academic degree , teaching experience ,and interactional effect between them .In doing so, initially using an explanatory sequential mixed method survey design a five–point Lickert scale ,29-items Reflective Teaching Questionnaire including (practical, meta-cognitive, critical, cognitive and affective ) was distributed to 142 EFL teachers (male and female) with 4 to 30+ years of professional experience with BA, MA, and PhD. academic degrees. Considering teaching experience, the participants were categorized into three groups.MANOVA results indicated the significant effect of teachers’ experience on their reflective teaching with the least effect reported on the affective dimension. Secondly, sixteen EFL teachers were invited to participate in an interview. The results of the present study will be useful for EFL teachers to have effective teaching, and to involve themselves more in exploring their students’ learning styles and critical aspects of the teaching context. Obviously, reflective teaching would help teachers to foster their independence. The analysis revealed that shortage of time, prescribed syllabi, predetermined textbooks, and ineffective teacher training programs were the main obstacles to reflectivity as experienced by the teachers. The outcomes have pedagogical implications for Iranian EFL teachers and theoreticians in the area of language teaching.