Pedagogical barriers

ELT has recently witnessed a shift away from a method-bound orientation and toward a post-methodic view of teaching English. Consequently, the focus of some second language teacher education programs has shifted toward sociopolitical aspects of ELT (Miller, 2004) and its contributions to reinforcement or transformation of the status quo (Kumaravadivelu, 2003a). Yet, in many countries, including Iran, ELT teacher education has maintained a relatively method-bound focus on technical dimensions of teaching English and has avoided adopting a critical and sociopolitical approach to ELT. In order to investigate the ways in which teacher education as currently practiced facilitates or stifles implementation of postmethod in ELT, the present study explored English teachers’ perceptions of the dominant approaches to teacher education in ELT centers in Iran and their ideological and pedagogical bases. To this end, 23 language teachers were interviewed about the logistics, content, and procedures of the teacher education programs they had attended. The analysis of the interviews, as directed by grounded theory, yielded three themes, namely no/little teacher learners’ involvement in course design and implementation, dominance of a transmission model, and dominance of a linguistic and technical focus

In an attempt to liberate teachers from deficiencies of the conventional methods, Kumaravadivelu (1994) proposed the concept of “post method condition” to overcome the challenges caused by the very nature of methods. The literature regarding post-method pedagogy has indicated that most of the studies focus on its theoretical aspect, while the practical realization has been largely untouched. To this end, the present study was an endeavor to unveil the perspective of Iranian EFL teachers concerning the applicability of this pedagogy. 21 male and female in-service EFL teachers from different cities in Iran (Shiraz, Marvdasht, Bushehr, Tehran, and Gonbad-e-Kavus) participated in this qualitative research where data came from semi-structured interviews as the primary source of data collection. The interview data were transcribed and coded using Straus and Corbin’s (1998) constant comparative method, including three codification processes of open, axial and selective codings. The finding indicated that absence of required autonomy among teachers, teacher’s job security, students’ passivity, absence of critical thinking skills among students, dominance of transmission model of teacher education, inefficiency of the textbooks, teacher’s focus on coverage and grade pressure, and demanding nature of post-method pedagogy as the main pedagogical barriers which prevent language teachers from applying this pedagogy in their teaching practices.