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Teachers professional identity: Contributions of a critical EFL teachereducation course in Iran

Arman Abednia*,1

Allameh Tabatabai University, Department of English Language and Literature, Allameh Tabatabai Ave., Chamran Expressways, 19979 Tehran, Iran

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:

Received 17 May 2011

Received in revised form

30 December 2011

Accepted 14 February 2012

Keywords:

Critical pedagogy

Critical TESOL teacher education

Grounded theory

Professional identity

Teacher education

a b s t r a c t

This paper is a report on contributions of a critical EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher educationcourse to Iranian teachers professional identity reconstruction.2 Pre-course and post-course interviews

with seven teachers, their reective journals, class discussions, and the teacher educators reective

journals were analyzed as guided by grounded theory. Three major shifts were observed in their

professional identities: from conformity to and romanticization of dominant ideologies to critical

autonomy, from no orientation or an instrumentalist orientation to a critical/transformative orientation

of teaching, and from a linguistic and technical view to an educational view of second language

education.

2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Background

A brief glance at the (immediate) history of TESOL shows its

divorce from educational and critical theory and rather exclusive

focus on asocial and cognitive linguistic dimensions of second

language education (Crookes & Lehner, 1998; May, 2011;

Pennycook, 1990; White, 1989). However, more recent literature

on TESOL highlights its increasing awareness of its educational side

and political agenda which has resulted in the emergence of

interest in the contributions of constructivist and critical theories of

education to second language education in the inner circle (e.g.,

Benesch, 2001, 2009; Conagarajah, 2005;Crookes, 2009a, 2009b,

2010; Kumaravadivelu, 2003, 2006; Norton & Toohey, 2004;

Pennycook, 2001) as well as the Middle East (Wachob, 2009).

A similar shift of focus is observed in TESOL teacher education.

Early attempts to educate L2 teachers were mainly characterized by

transmitting externally dened and prescribed techniques

(Freeman, 2001; Richards, 2008; Richards & Farrell, 2005) toteachers whose prior experiences and beliefs were ignored

(Freeman, 1989; Imig & Imig, 2006). While this approach is still

more or less in vogue in many contexts, more awareness of the

complex nature of teacher development has resulted in a shift

toward more constructivist and critical approaches to teacher

education.

Regarding the constructivist side of this change, instead of

reducing teachers to passive technicians, who mainly practice

others theories, teacher education has come to consider teachers

as reective practitioners, who have the ability to theorize about

their practices and practice their personal theories (Grifths, 2000;

Kumaravadivelu, 2003; Wallace, 1995). The main assumption

underlying the constructivist orientation is that student teachers

are not empty vessels to be lled with knowledge and skills ofteaching. Rather, they are already equipped with prior experiences

and personal beliefs which inform their teaching knowledge and

practice (Freeman & Johnson, 1998). This new understanding led to

increased interest among researchers in teacher related issues such

as teacher cognition, teacher beliefs (e.g., Freeman, 1996, 1998;

Freeman & Johnson, 1998; Woods, 1996), and, especially in the

last decade, teacher professional identity (e.g., Nguyen, 2008; Singh

and Richards, 2006; Tsui, 2007).

Teacher professional identity is how teachers dene their

professional roles (Lasky, 2005). This dynamic construct (Barrett,

2008; Varghese, Morgan, Johnston, & Johnson, 2005) has been

Abbreviations: EFL, English as a foreign language; ELT, English language

teaching; L2, Second/Foreign language; TESOL, Teaching English to speakers of

other languages

* Tel.: 989122580788(Mobile); fax: 982122064621.

E-mail address:[email protected] Present Address: Floor 3, No. 16, 194 East, Shahed Boulevard, Tehran-

pars,1655868741, Tehran, Iran.2 My preference for the word reconstructionrather than construction is inspired

by the constructivist belief that student teachers, pre-service and in-service, bring

prior experiences and personal values and beliefs to teacher education programs,

and, thus, their professional identities have already been partly constructed.

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Teaching and Teacher Education

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r . c o m/ l o c a t e / t a t e

0742-051X/$ e see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.tate.2012.02.005

Teaching and Teacher Education 28 (2012) 706e717
mailto:[email protected]://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0742051Xhttp://www.elsevier.com/locate/tatehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2012.02.005http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2012.02.005http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2012.02.005http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2012.02.005http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2012.02.005http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2012.02.005http://www.elsevier.com/locate/tatehttp://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0742051Xmailto:[email protected]

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shown to have signicant effects on teachers development and

performance. Even, from a sociocultural perspective, learning to

teach is primarily a process of professional identity construction

rather than knowledge acquisition (Nguyen, 2008; Varghese et al.,

2005). Therefore, the extent to which teacher education leads to

positive changes is believed to be largely determined by the iden-

tities teachers bring to courses and how they are reconstructed

during teacher education (Singh and Richards, 2006).

As mentioned above, in addition to emergence of the

constructivist approach to teacher education with increased

attention to professional identity as a majoroutcome, a more recent

and yet less considerable innovation in TESOL teacher education

has been the emergence of a critical and sociopolitical approach. It

was observed that constructivist-oriented reective models of

teaching failed to factor in the political, ethical, and emancipatory

dimensions of teaching (Akbari, 2007; Jay & Johnson, 2002). This

observation resulted in the perceived need to go beyond the

conception of teachers as reective practitionersand embrace the

idea of teachers as transformative intellectuals(Giroux, 1992) and

cultural workers (Freire, 2005) who can think critically and act

transformatively. This new focus surfaced in a number of studies

recently done in the area of critical TESOL teacher education.

Hawkins and Norton (2009)believe these studies have three major

foci: contributions of critical teacher education to student teacherscritical awareness of how power relations form and function in

society (e.g.,Hawkins, 2004; Pennycook, 2004), encouragement of

their critical reection on their own identity and positioning in

society (e.g., Lin, 2004; Stein, 2004), and types of pedagogical

relations which are established between teacher educators and

student teachers (e.g., Crookes & Lehner, 1998; Toohey &

Waterstone, 2004). Hawkins and Norton (2009) conclude,

however, that critical TESOL teacher education seems to be at best

at an embryonic stage as there still is a lot of room for research on

how it can be practiced and what contributions it can make.

Encouraged by Hawkins and Nortons (2009) call for more

research in this area-which, in my opinion, is particularly lacking in

EFL contexts- and the enormous signicance attached to theprocess of professional identity formation in teacher education

(Nguyen, 2008; Singh and Richards, 2006), I decided to conduct

a study on contributions of a critical EFL teacher education course

to Iranian EFL teachers professional identity reconstruction. A

stronger reason behind this study, however, was that, based on my

teacher education and supervision experience, EFL teacher educa-

tion in academic and private settings in Iran usually follows

a transmission orientation and, thus, excludes student teachersvoices and beliefs to a great extent.

Conceptually, this study was mainly directed by the argument

that, for TESOL teacher education to help teachers act as trans-

formative intellectuals, it should provide them with the opportu-

nity to actively (re)construct their teacher identities, since

teachers who are not well aware of professional roles and stancesthey already have and those they aspire to cannot develop the

critical awareness and transformative potential necessary for

problematizing and changing the status quo. The major research

question directing this study was In what ways does critical EFL

teacher education contribute to EFL teachers professional identity

construction? which was broken down into three specic

questions:

1.What features mainly characterize EFL student teachersprofessional identity prior to critical EFL teacher education?

2. What features mainly characterize EFL student teachersprofessional identity following critical EFL teacher education?

3. What major changes are made in EFL student teachers

professional identity during critical EFL teacher education?

2. Method

In this study, a critical teacher education course was developed

and implemented. Pre-course and post-course interviews on

professional identity with seven in-service teachers, their reective

journals, recorded class discussions, and my (the teacher educa

tors) reective journals were analyzed through which some

themes revealing changes in their professional identities were

identied. A detailed discussion follows.

2.1. The critical EFL teacher education course

In order to conduct a critical EFL teacher education course, I

rst developed a tentative framework (Abednia, 2009). Based on

a review of the available literature on Critical Pedagogy (CP), 20

principles of CP for ELT (English Language Teaching) curriculum

which were developed by Crawford (1978) based on a Freirian

persuasion of CP were found to be comprehensive enough to

serve as the basis of the course. I classied the principles into

Richards (1989) components of teacher education, namelyapproach, content, process, teacher roles and teacher educato

roles. Some of the principles as categorized are as follows:

2.1.1. Approach

1. The purpose of teacher education is to develop critica

thinking by presenting the student teachers situation to

them as a problem so that they can perceive, reect, and act

on it.

2. The acquisition of information and skills related to teaching is

a secondary objective of teacher education, and the content of

such acquisition is subject to creative action.

2.1.2. Content

1. The content of curriculum derives from the life situation of the

student teacher as expressed in the themes of their reality.

2. Student teachers produce their own learning materials.

2.1.3. Process

1. Dialog forms the context of the educational situation.

2. The content of the curriculum is posed as a problem.

2.1.4. Teacher educators roles

1. The teacher educator participates in learning process as

a participant among student teachers.

2. The teacher educators function is one of posing problems.

2.1.5. Student teachers roles

1. The student teacher is one who acts on objects.

2. The student teacher possesses the right to and power of deci-

sion making.

The framework was implemented in a course of Second

Language Teaching Methodology in a BA English Translation

program at Allameh Tabatabai University (ATU), Tehran. The class

met twice a week for 14 weeks. To start with, the content was

negotiated in different ways. Some topics were chosen based on

ideas which emerged from class discussions, while others were

introduced independently by me. Regarding selection of readings

in some sessions the student teachers were asked to nd papers or

chapters from certain websites and books. When it seemed too

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difcult for them to do so, I would choose and assign materials (See

Appendix I).

The student teachers were asked to study the materials criti-

cally, trying to analyze issues in light of their real life experiences.

Equipped with a basic understanding of each reading, we would

discuss the major issues in class and group discussions. Attempts

were made to treat readings in a questioning manner and establish

connections between them and the participants real life experi-

ences and concerns. Following the discussions, they were asked to

write journals reecting on one or more aspects of the discussed

topics and develop their personal perspectives.

To fulll the dialogical and critical promises of the course better,

they were asked to write two class-assessments and two self

assessments, focusing on course procedures and their own progress

respectively. Their evaluation was based on their portfolios which

consisted of journals and class and self assessments. Their perfor-

mance in discussions also contributed to the evaluation.

2.2. Participantsbackground

The class consisted of 24 students. A screening interview

revealed that 10 were not and did not intendto be EFL teachers, and

three were not willing to take part in the study. The pre-course

interview was conducted with the remaining 11 four of whom

proved, in the long run, not to be actively involved in class activities

and assignments. Thus, seven teachers (2 male and 5 female)

whose experience of teaching ranged between 6 months and 3

years were nally selected. They were senior B.A. students of

Translation Studies, and four of them are currently working toward

a masters degree in TESOL, three in Iran and one abroad. Five of

them were from Tehran and two from two other cities. They were

21e22 years old. One of the male participants was a Christian and

the rest were Muslims. They all were at an advanced level of

language ability, while one of the female participants who had

lived in Canada for about ve years was functionally bilingual.

Since the participants were my students in the course and,

therefore, their participation in the study could be due to the typeof power relation between us, they were assured that their

participation, or lack thereof, in this project wouldhave no effecton

my evaluation of their performance. A culture of democratic dialog

and openness was developed early on in the course, which they

clearly acknowledged in casual out-of-class talks during and after

the course. Therefore, I chose to trust the genuineness of their

willingness to take part in the study and proved to have been right

in the long run. Of course, their consent was formally sought by

asking them to sign a form of informed consent, following

obtaining the agreement of Department of Translation Studies.

To aid with understanding their educational background,

perceptions of ve of the participants shared in a focus group

discussion which was conducted after the course for another study

are drawn upon(Abednia et al., 2009; Fahim & Abednia, 2010). Theyall had come from a heavily transmission-oriented and

memorization-based schooling background, as they had fallen into

such habits as passive reception of ideas from their teachers and

regurgitation of rightknowledge presented to them. Also, content

of instruction both in school and university was predetermined

rather than negotiated, hence striking them as unrelated to their

real life concerns. The main consequences of this background, they

argued, were their mainly aiming at passing courses rather than

learning, lack of willingness to unlearn traditional habits of

learning and develop critical thinking skills, and lack of critical

awareness of their surroundings.

In addition to the lecture formatof their educational context, the

fundamentalist religious and political atmosphere of Iran had taken

a toll as well. Since this side of their background was never brought

up by them in the focus group discussion, a silence which told

enough, a brief glance at the historical origins of this atmosphere is

in order. Following the Islamic Revolution in 1979, a cleric-led

government was formed, amounting to the dominance of an

elites reading of Islam. Our religion is the same as our politics, and

our politics is the same as our religion was not only printed

on 100-Rial bills but also rigidly enforced in different spheres,

including academia. Consequently, an organization called

Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution, consisting of the presi-

dent, the heads of the legislature and judiciary and some academic

gures, was established in order to frame and implement new

policies on students admission to universities. Based on the

perceived connection between religious and political beliefs,

anyone holding antigovernment beliefs was considered to have

anti-Islamic views and, consequently, deprived of academic study

(Farhady & Hedayati, 2009). The same criteria are still in effect, and

the participants in this study were most probably aware of this, as

they would distance themselves from discussion about political,

religious, and other unsafe issues related to (English) education in

Iran, especially early in the course.

2.3. Data collection

Interview was the main tool for exploring the shifts in the

participants professional identities. Based on an in-depth literature

review, Kelchtermans s (1993) conceptualization of teacher identity

was chosen as the basis of the interview since it provides

a comprehensive picture of its different dimensions: self-image,

their description of themselves as teachers, self-esteem, their eval-

uation of their teaching abilities and skills in different terms, job

motivation, their motivation and commitment with regard to their

profession and factors affecting their motivation, task perception,

their denition of different aspects of their job, and future

perspective, their outlook on their career progress. To enrich and

update this rather dated categorization, others conceptualizations

were incorporated into the interview framework as well, such as

Bolvar and Domingos (2006)retrospective identity and prospec-tive identity and Varghese et al.s (2005) claimed vs. assigned

identity. Also, background, including family background and career

biography, was added to the above categories due to its signicance

to professional identity construction (Barrett, 2008; Beijaard,

Meijer, & Verloop, 2004; Flores & Day, 2006). The emotional

aspect of identity was also included since it helps illuminate

teachers professional identity (Zembylas, 2005). Finally, self-

esteem was replaced by self-efcacy due to the signicance

attached to this construct in teacher education and the rich line of

research which has contributedto itsdenition(Tschannen-Moran,

Woolfolk Hoy, & Hoy, 1998).

Based on the above framework, a number of questions were

developed and grouped along with a few borrowed from the

reviewed studies. The rst draft of the interview framework wasreviewed by some experts (e.g., Beijaard, October, 2008, personal

communication) and slightly revised (SeeAppendixII).

Since I was going to interview the participants before and after

the teacher education course, a post-course version of the inter-

view framework was also developed. Therefore, the items whose

answers would remain the same, e.g., background items, were

omitted (SeeAppendix III). The semi-structured interviews lasted

from 1:15 hours to beyond two hours. In order to ensure compre-

hensivenessand depth of interviews, some interviews were held on

two or three occasions as to not exhaust the interviewees and

myself. Upon the interviewees request, all of the interviews were

conducted at ATU. The language of interview was English while the

participants could talk in Farsi when they preferred to or when

asked by me. In the rare cases in which Farsi was used, I tried to

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translate sentences in a meaning-based manner, trying to avoid any

changes in the intervieweesideas and intentions.

To explore the process of the participantsprofessional identity

(re)construction, I also drew upon around 50 reective journals

written by the participants throughout the course, 30 h of recor-

ded class and group discussions, two recorded critical incidents

which occurred in the second week and the middle of the course

due to the participantsconfusion over the negotiated and critical

nature of the course and resistance to it, as well as my own

reective journals on the process of the course and the critical

incidents. However, most of the excerpts included in the discus-

sion come from interviews, and, thus, their sources are not

identied.

2.4. Data analysis

The data were analyzed as guided by grounded theory (GT)

(Glaser, 1978; Glaser & Strauss,1967) because of two major reasons.

First, GT is believed to contribute insights into self and how people

interpret different phenomena (Suddaby, 2006) as well as

processes going on in theeld of study(Giske & Artinian, 2007, p.

68). This feature corresponds with the main objective of this study

which is exploring the process of professional identity formation. In

addition, being the researcher and instructor of the course simul-

taneously raises the concern of researcher bias. Since GT encour-

ages guarding against researchers prior assumptions and

construction of a theory grounded in data, it could help develop

categories which are more anchored in data than assumed by me.

Through open coding the collected data were broken into

meaningful units of analysis, which could be words, phrases, sen-

tences and/or even larger bodies of language data (Mavetera &

Kroeze, 2009). Axial coding was done through reassembling the

data innew waysin order tond meaningful relationships between

the codes extracted in open coding. The extracted categories went

through conceptual selective analysis in selective coding, during

which a table was drawn to juxtapose the selected categories fromthe rst interview and other early-course data of each participant

with those of their second interview and other late course data,

hence comparing codes referring to the same aspect of each

participants professional identity across the two interviews and, as

a result, capture the process of professional identity construction

gone through by each. Memo writing, theoretical sampling and

constant comparison were also conducted throughout this process

to deepen the analysis. Finally, after rening the extracted cate-

gories, literature was reviewed to enrich the discussion.

A number of measures were taken to ensure trustworthiness of

the data. Corrective listening helped me identify any inaccuracies in

the process of interview transcription. Within-method triangula-

tion was done through asking a number of questions with similar

foci so that the interviewees would approach one issue fromdifferent angles and provide answers which complement each

other. Investigator triangulation was done through asking

a researcher to read through some codes extracted in the open

coding phase and decide howclose her interpretations of data were

to mine. Memo writing and constant comparison of the data also

helped me increase its conrmability (Mertens, 2005). Finally, the

multiple case design of this study strengthens transferability of the

data (Yin, 1994).

When reading the following discussion of changes in seven

teachers professional identity, one should keep in mind that the

dynamics of identity formation in these teachers was most prob-

ably affected by the other students and, thus, different observations

would be made if there were no other students in the course. All

names in the following are pseudonyms.

3. Changes in the participantsprofessional identities

3.1. From conformity to and romanticization of dominant ideologies

to critical autonomy

3.1.1. Early in the course: conformity to and romanticization of

dominant ideology

The technical-rational discourse of teacher training usually

leads to teachers minimal involvement in decision making and

establishment of educational policies and reduces their contribu-

tion to the operational level of teaching (Ben-Peretz, 2001). Imig

and Imig (2006)argue this is because:

The idea of teachers constructing their own lessons sends

shivers down the spines of many policy makers. Teachers, they

argue, should deliver the prescribed lessons much like the mail

carrier delivers the mail (p. 290).

This ideology immobilizes teachers critical treatment of the

given presented in statements of the obvious to the point that

many of them tend not to question the superordinate statu

conferred on the mainstream reading of education (Bartolome

2004). It was observed that the participants in this study were

not immune to this discourse. As evidenced by many ideas they

expressed in the early sessions of the course and therst interview

they seemed to have entered the course with a romanticized view

of ideologies promoted by authorities including language schools

managers, theoreticians, and authors of English instruction

textbooks.

To begin with, Saba was not eager to examine institutional rule

critically and, on different occasions, showed her willingness to

obey them: because you are the teacher of that institute, you

should obey the rules of that institute. Sara tended to have

a similar approach. Unhappy with lack of discipline at some

language centers, she was interested in working at famous

language schools mainly because they would have some specic

methodwhich she could follow. In a similar vein, Mana rational-

ized her having adopted a subservient position by saying:

I tend to notinterfere with the system. because it would be me

against the mainstream, I dont appreciate that. It would be just

me exhausting myself to exasperation and nothing will change

really because being a female, I dont think that anybody would

take me seriously.

Peyman also believed he had to follow rules and objectives o

the EFL center where he was teaching since he wanted to staythere. Elsewhere, he expressed his desire to become a standard

acceptableteacher by which he meant a person whose students

. 80 to 90% of his students are satised with what they have gone

through during the term.

Almost the same attitude was adopted by many of the teachers

toward ideologies and principles transferred by theoreticians andmaterials developers who, they thought, possessed the righ

understanding of ELT. That is, they didnt seem to have a critica

view of imported ideologies and didnt think of their own ideas to

be worthy of much credit. For example, Peyman and Maryam

thought they were supposed to obey teachers guides as they would

provide them with a rather complete recipe. Or, Sina had taken the

adequacy of ideas and guidelines expressed in books on ELT for

granted since their authors were well-known.

In the early sessions and, less so, toward the middle of the

course, the student teachers seemed to have a similarly conformist

and uncritical approach to some teaching methodology course

materials. For example, in a class discussion about ELT methods

since the selected chapter (Celce-Murcia, 2001) presented

a detailed discussion of differences between methods, the


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participants came to the class more or less bewildered and, as

Peyman put it, full, meaning they thought they were supposed to

memorize all details rather than analyzing them critically. For

example, Peyman, nearly representing the ideas of the rest,

believed he hadnt understood the chapter since he failed to

recognize some of the claimed differences between the methods

and, instead, mistakenly found some to be similar in practice.

Interestingly, he and almost all the rest disapproved of their own

understanding while they were unconsciously referring to one of

the main criticisms of the concept of method, i.e. its being built on

seeing differences where similarities may be more important, since

methods that are different in abstract principle seem to be far less

so in classroom practice(Allwright, 1991,p. 7).

This normative orientation wasmore or less observed in some of

their early reective journals too in that many of them would

mainly reproduce what they had read rather than write their own

opinions and reactions. The bulk of some of their reective journals

was allocated to expertsopinions with a little room given to their

own thoughts. Therefore, their reections were mostly a reection

of authorsand theoreticiansideas rather than one of their own.

3.1.2. Shift to critical autonomy

Based on the second interview and class discussions and

reective journals done toward the end of the course, the student

teachers seemed to have started to redene their teacher self and

reconsider and reprioritize their professional responsibilities.

Awareness of their former conformist positions and romanticized

views of authorities attitudes provided one set of evidence. Sina

didnt approve of his old uncritical reading habits any longer as he

found he was, inFreires (1998)words, a captive of the mind of the

text(p. 34):

I just read them and put into action the same thing that I read. I

didnt think ifit isright, itis wrong,it isgood,it isbad, itis going

to work or not.

Peyman also did not approve of his former denition of what he

called a standardteacher as, in the second interview, he said:

If you do your job right, then even there may be some students

who really dont like what youve done but later as they expe-

rience other people and other methods they know what has

been right and what has been wrong.

Withrespectto institutionalregulations, theyhad started to treat

given rules critically and construct and value their own principles

based on which they would dene their professional responsibili-

ties. Forexample, while Saba used to believe shehad to obey rulesof

an EFL centersimply because shewas teachingthere, shesaid,in the

second interview, we are not bound to accept everything. Else-

where she said she would feel disempowered when I see that

authorities forwho I amworkingdecide instead of me formy classes

.

They are the authorities but I am the teacher of that class

. Whatshe sounded to be particularly against was authoritiesauthoritari-

anism rather than their authority (Kanpol, 1999).

Mana showed a similar change in her perspective. While earlier

she had been against opposing norms as it would lead to exhaus-

tion, she showed more interest in following her personal theories.

Disapproving of teachers who obey rules and are biblically

correct, she said rules are meant to be broken or bent.Likewise,

Sara, who would prefer to work in famous EFL centers where rules

were strong enough to prevent indiscipline, later said I prefer an

institute which is not famous. We cannot break those limits.This

echoesCrookes(2010)observation that margins are places where

the established order is weak and the writ of law or regulation less

effective, so they should be places where experiment and

boundary-crossing can ourish

(p. 337).

These changes are indicative of the teachers self-defense of

their own dignityand their attempts to have autonomy in the

construction of the curriculum and of the pedagogic process (Aronowitz, 1998, p. 12) as they realized that teachers cannot

be effective when they remain in the thrall of an exploitative

system that robs them of their own voice (Aronowitz, 1998,

p. 13).

Similar changes appeared to have happened to Shivas and

Maryams attitudes toward textbooks. For example, Shiva who

wouldnt doubt the relevance and usefulness of English instruction

textbooks commented they must be adapted since their authors are

not familiar with the context of Iran and Iranian students needs

and interests. Likewise, while Maryam used to believe she had to

follow teacher guides scrupulously, at the end of the course she

believed she had become more self-condent and didnt approve of

her previous normative ideas about teacher guides and other

imported ideologies any longer. Her new level of awareness was in

line with Freires observation that teachers critical reection on

their practice is not prioritized in teachers guide books which are

developed by illuminated intellectuals who occupy the center of

power(Freire, 1998, p. 43).

The above observations show that the participants had become

more aware of their old uncritical habits and attitudes and had

started to reconsider them. They had also become more conscious

of limitations imposed on them by authorities and institutions. As

a result, they had started to redene their own positions, rights, and

roles.

3.2. From no orientation or an instrumentalist orientation to

a critical and transformative orientation of teaching

Why the teachers chose to teach as well as changes which

happened in their reasons for continuing to teach are the focus of

this theme. It is discussed that early on in the course some proved

to have had almost no reason for having started to teach and the

rest had started to teach mainly for instrumental and materialistic

reasons. However, toward the end of the course, their orientationshifted to a critical and transformative one.

3.2.1. Early in the course: no orientation/an instrumentalist

orientation

When market demands serve as the main determinant of

priorities and objectives of an educational system (Helsby,

1999), one cannot expect teachers, who are to function as

operatives in this factory-like system (Parker, 1997), to act

otherwise. The pervasive instrumentalist view tends to deprive

teachers of control over content and method of teaching and

helps authorities centralize control over policies and plans in

the name of accountability and in support of the standards

movement (Ben-Peretz, 2001; Cochran-Smith, 2001). This

instrumentalist view may even penetrate teachers mindsetsand professional identities to the point that many teachers also

tend to think of teaching as an instrument to further their own

and authorities interests. Put differently, in addition to

depriving teachers of freedom of action, an instrumentalist

ideology tends to limit their freedom of thought and inculcate

an instrumentalist spirit into them and the way they dene their

professional roles (Parker, 1997). Early on in the course, it was

found that professional identities and ideologies of most of the

participants hadnt survived intact since their thoughts and

attitudes were, to a great extent, in line with the market

demands, and the rest of the teachers appeared to lack attitude

altogether. The latter will be discussed rst below.

When asked why she started to teach, Maryam seemed to have

had no reasons. She, on one occasion, said:

I did not think of myself


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as a teacher. It just happenedand, on another, explained I started

to teach suddenly .One of my teachers at the institute suggested

me to apply for a job and I did. Saba also appeared to lack

personally dened reasons when starting to teach:

I dont know why. Because I was successful, I don t know, my

friends said that you are so successful in being a student, in your

language learning. So one of my classmates, you know, he told

me it is good to teach. So I accepted his suggestion.

The rest of the teachers had thought of certain reasons when

starting to teach, but the reasons were of a more or less instru-

mentalist nature. For one thing, most of them referred to money as

a major reason. For instance, Shiva said that she had initially opted

for teaching because of money and experience, and she was not at

all interested in teaching. She then added that she had gained

enough experience but could not stop teaching again for money.Similarly, Peyman, Mana, and Sara referred to money as a chief

concern. Mana partly attributed the recent decrease in her enthu-

siasm for teaching to low payment:

I guess it is the way I am treated as a teacher. I don t receive

enough respect as a teacher as I should have. I mean the

payment is of course really really awful. If I were doing inter-preting, I would get ve times more.

When asked what problems she faced as a teacher, Sara said:

Apart from something like the pay which, you know, is awful,

there has been no other problem.

Gaining experience and, to a lesser degree, improving their

language knowledge were the other frequently mentioned reasons

behind teaching. Like Shiva, who considered experience as an

initial reason, Sara had also started to teach partly for experience as

she could practice what she was learning as a university student.

And, Peyman clearly referred to his own language development as

a strong reason for choosing to teach:

I had to keep the knowledge that I had, avoid forgetting it in any

way. As you know by teaching, when you use something a lot,when you are in contact with material constantly, chances are

you are forgetting things much less than when youre not.

The teachers also mentioned some other reasons which, from

a critical perspective, are no more favorable than the above. Sara,

for example, said:

I had nothing else as a job.While I am studying, the best thing

to do and the easiest thing to do is to go and teach some-

where.you know, in institutes you can choose the time, you

say I want one class, I want two classes. You are not necessarily

full-time teacher.

For Shiva teaching was a form of escapism too: If I am busy, I

feel better, I want to ll my time. Disapproving of this attitude,

Freire (2005)emphasizes that one mustnt enter teaching:

.because one lacks other opportunities, much less as some-

thing to pass the time while waiting for marriage. With such

motivations, which suggest how one denes educational prac-

tice, one can only relate to the practice as a passerby waits out

the rain (p. 63).

On the whole, the teachers had started teaching for either no

particular reason or gaining experience, making money, etc.

What made the picture even uglier was that some of them

clearly said they were very likely to leave teaching after a while.

This evidence exemplies lack of mission (Goodlad, 1998) and,

by extension, lack of a professional identity which entails

looking at ones job as a profession and a means of social

transformation.

3.2.2. Shift to a critical and transformative approach

Toward the end of the course, however, some changes in the

teachersattitudes and reasons for teaching seemed to be taking

place. They tended to talk more about awareness raising and

transforming the status quo than about making money and

gaining experience. This does not follow that nancial and self-

development purposes were not there any longer, especially

because every teacher naturally thinks about them. Rather, they

had started to reorder their professional priorities and realign

with a more humanistic, social and emancipatory approach to

education.

Their heightened awareness of more critical and trans

formative reasons behind teaching made them question their

own priorities and reasons. For example, while Shiva had

referred to income as her main motivation for teaching, in the

second interview she criticized those who teach just to get

money. Or Sara, who had clearly referred to low pay as the only

serious problem she faced, disapproved of teachers who prior-

itize money: many of teachers may care for money, just money

And they are not there to stay one minute more in the class

Constant comparison of different parts of the data made these

changes more tangible and real. For example, at the end of the

course, Shiva said that she looked at teaching as a real job but

not like before as a source of moneyand elsewhere explained

I cannot say thats not because of money, I need it. But Im no

just working for money. Likewise, in a class discussion, Sara

showed great interest in teaching even when there would be no

money involved. She believed that a teacher must teach as best

as they can no matter how much they are paid.

Critical pedagogists actively encourage teachers to maintain thi

attitude and willingness to dare teach even when they are faced

with undesirable conditions:

We must dare so that we can continue to teach for a long time

under conditions that we know well:low salaries,lack of respec

.We mustdareso that wecan continue todo so evenwhen it i

so much more materially advantageous to stop daring ( Macedo& Freire, 2005, p. xxv).

Another set of evidence also showed the teachers reordering

some of their professional objectives and priorities. More precisely

in the second interview they talked about some reasons fo

teaching that most of them had rarely referred to before, if at all

Among the most recurring was bringing about change in people

and society. For example, Shiva said that she had decided to stay in

teaching to make changes in her studentsminds and lives and, to

this end, would ask her students to write reective journals about

topics they liked. Maryam, Sina, and Mana, referring to CP and

postmethod as more or less the basis of their newly adopted

educational views, emphasized that change in their studentslives

is a very important reason of their teaching. Similarly, Peyman

seemed to pay more serious attention to the transformative logic oteaching:

I try to encourage them to be independent individually,meaning

they have to come up with solutions to take the initiative

themselves and make progress by themselves without any

bodyshelp. I try to develop that feeling of self sufciency.

Raising students awareness was another teaching goal on which

some of them laid particular stress. Sara saw herselfas someone to

encourage them; rst, toguide themand then givethemthe chance

to come to some realization of themselves and their abilitiesGoing beyond students awareness, Mana emphasized enlightening

parents: Id ask the parents to cooperate, to do something, sit

down with them and go through it to understand what happens

We can raise awareness in parents.


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Love of teaching was another reason referred to by some.

Although Sina had talked about love of teaching in the rst inter-

view, later he would talk more emphatically and seriously about

lovingness which, to him, would make teaching an invaluable

service to humanity. Sara also showed that love had become

a major priority in her denition of teaching: I have discovered

that a teacher who wants to stay as a good teacher has to have

a great deal of love, echoing Freires observation that: It is

impossible to teach without the courage [and] a forged, invented,

and well-thought-out capacity to love(Freire, 2005, p. 5).

Developing a transformative approach made the participants

take teaching more seriously so that those who had chosen

teaching for no or instrumentalist reasons started to consider it

a serious career which could help them fulll their social duties. As

a result, they reconsidered their initial thoughts about leaving

teaching. Sara, for example, admitted: I said I may stop it, now I

like to be a teacher. Similarly, Shiva said: I never liked teaching,

but really I look at it as a joband wished to become a teacher who

goes to the class, thinks of the class as his/her last class, and does

his/her best.

3.3. From a linguistic and technical view to an educational view of

ELT

While the previous theme had to do with why the teachers

chose to teach, this theme is about their perceptions of the

scope of ELT. More specically, it focuses on whether they

consider ELT as merely aimed at teaching ESL/EFL or going

beyond language instruction and fullling educationally-

oriented promises such as helping people become critical

thinkers and active citizens.

3.3.1. Early in the course: a linguistic and technical view of ELT

Mainstream second language education has concerned itself so

much with the linguistic side of ELT that it has lost sight of broader

social and political issues involved in its educational side

(Pennycook, 1990; Phillipson, 1992; Stern, 1983; White, 1989;Widdowson, 2000). In other words, what mainstream applied

linguists have principally focused on are questions that are of

a mainly linguistic and psycholinguistic nature such as What is the

relationship between conscious and subconscious learning, and

which is more important? and Is there a logical problem in

second language acquisition that the outcome cannot be explained

in terms of the input? (Pennycook, 1990, p. 303) This primarily

linguistic obsession has led to the neglect of such fundamental

socioculturally-oriented questions as Under what conditions can

induction into a new language and culture be empowering? and

How can students pose their own problems through the second

language? (Pennycook, 1990, p. 311). What exacerbates this

imbalance is the current fetish in teacher training about teachers mastery of emptytechniques at the cost of ignoring acquisition of

theoretical knowledge and power of decision making (Cochran-

Smith, 2004). This technical approach encourages teachers to

subscribe to the latest methods and techniques of teaching content

without almost any reection on ideological and political aspects of

education (Bartolome, 2004; Freire, 2005).

As evidenced by the way they would dene their professional

roles, the participants in this study seemed to have entered the

course with a heavily linguistic and technical orientation to L2

teaching. To start with, they would frequently talk about language

prociency and technical expertise as the major factors involved in

good teaching. Peyman, for example, was rst and foremost con-

cerned about language prociency in dening a successful teacher:

Personally I think that a teacher must have a professional level

of knowledge of a language, so those whoreally actually impress

me are the people who have very few pronunciation mistakes,

grammatical mistakes, they were really uent, they had the

right accent, the right intonation.

Mana also showed a similar orientation, as the rst point she

mentioned about her positive models of teaching was the thick

British accentof one of her university teachers, and there was no

mention of any teacher characteristics foregrounded in educational

and critical theory in the rest of her talk. Likewise, Saba referred tolanguage prociency as her top priority for self-development.

The other teachers language-bound conceptualization of ELT

surfaced in other ways. For example, Sina seemed to be teaching

EFL mainly because of his interest in language itself and exploring

its unknown nature and psychological processes involved in

learning it. Or, Maryam believed that her sole responsibility to her

colleagues was to help students master the language content of her

class so that her colleagues wouldnt have problems dealing with

them at higher levels. Also, in the class discussion about the

concepts of method and postmethod, she expressed her confusion

about postmethod advocates disapproving view of method era

since she, herself, as a product of mainstream ELT, was linguistically

procient and, thus, she was wondering what other contributions

ELT is supposed to make.The technical side of ELT also enjoyed an equally idealized status

in the eyes of most of the participants. When asked to evaluate his

knowledge of teaching, Sina described it as good enoughsince he

believed that reading a lot of theoretical and practical books had

provided himwith a lot of information about how to teach different

language skills. Maryam believed that knowledge of different

teaching techniques was the major advantage of good teachers.

Similarly, besides language mastery, the only issues Mana referred

to when describing her positive models revolved around language

instruction strategies:

He sits there and I know he knows because he is very very

knowledgeable but he pretends like he does not know. So he

starts a topic and says "what about that?" and everybody starts

talking about that topic to give him information whereas I know

he knows.

In her early-course data I failed to sense almost any concern on

her part for authentic communication with students and their

genuine mental involvement. Apparently incognizant of the

possibility that maximum oral participation means minimal

mental participation and minimal development (Bax,1997, p. 236),

she tended to attach more importance to making students talk a lot

than making them think deeply and talk sense. Interestingly, even

Saras disagreement with the insistence of authorities of language

centers on making students talk more again had to do with her

concern about students linguistic readiness rather than educa-

tional concerns like the one quoted from Bax above.

The last set of evidence revealing the centrality of linguistic andtechnical issues in the participantsunderstanding of the scope of

ELT and their own professional roles came from their attitudes to

language materials. When I asked them what materials they liked

or didnt like and why, I literally failed to observe any concern for

social and intellectual contributions of content and tasks. For

instance, Sina was mainlyconcerned about howthe four skills were

treated in books: I like the New Headway. It was well-organized,

the speaking was separated from listening, reading was sepa-

rated, the skills were separated. I liked it a lot. Sabas comment onChatterboxwas not much different: Its grammar was not enough.

The grammar was just given in a short part . but in dialog it is

a good book. Shiva also had a very similar outlook: I hate inter-

change.a lot of listening, you have to always dothe listening in the

class.

it was dif

cult for the students

. Of course, a few like Sina


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and Mana referred to the signicance of a communicative

approach, but it didnt necessarily show their concern for learnersnon-linguistic social skills as they were concerned about learners uent use of L2 in social interactions.

3.3.2. Shift to an educational view of ELT

During the course, as a result of disillusionment with a linguistic

and technical view of language education, the participants started

to reconsider their former perceptions and adopt a social and

educational approach to ELT which prioritizes such objectives as

awareness raising and social change. Maryam, who used to talk,

rather exclusively, about improving learners language ability,

commented, in the second interview, that her teaching ideas

mainly came from CP and listed among her main duties to her

students making them aware of the situation, what they can do,

making them aware of their capabilities, etc.

Similarly, Mana, who used to consider language prociency and

ability to increase student talking time as major criteria for judging

teaching ability, showed her interestin pursuing critical goals in her

career: education is awareness.Id like people to give whatever

they are being presented with thought and analyze the materials

without having to just learn it like a recorder. This is clearly in

keeping with Freires emphasis on reading with a critical approach

which contributes to authentic learning: Nobody studies authen-

tically who does not take the critical position of being the subject of

curiosity, of the reading, of the process of discovery(2005, p. 34).

Having gone beyond a classroom-bound denition of ELT, Sara

also emphasized teachers responsibility for raising learners critical

consciousness since, to her, these learners will be teachers of their

children and other people in the society, and, thus, will change

their lives and otherslives.

The student teachers perceptions of effective and appropriate

ELT materials also shifted away from a language orientation to one

prioritizing the relevance of materials to students real life and their

contribution to students criticality.

Shiva, for example, believed that commonly used ELT materials

are not related to studentsculture and do not include somethingthat is interesting for them, something that they think critically

about it, and express their ideas. Believing that these materials

incorporate just the things in the other parts of the world that we

havent seen,she lamented that students are merely supposed to

learn some grammatical points, some new vocabulary, and maybe

forget them very easily and soon, because they are not in the

context that you are.Sina, who used to admire Cutting Edgefor its

communicative approach, seemed to have shifted his focus to how

real its topics are: Usually they are about real life and real people.

They are not imaginary. They also include some unsafe topics about

diseases and poor people.

Some other participants also showed their willingness to

incorporate more of real life and unsafe topics into class content

too. For example,Mana, whose early discussions of materials wouldnot go beyond structural vs. communicative syllabuses, com-

mented that widely used textbooks have nothing to do with the

cultural understanding of students since the content is sort of

internationally correctand too euphemistic to be real.

3.4. An inconsistent case

The themes discussed above show a generally consistent trend

toward a more critical and transformative approach to ELT in the

process of the participants professional identity reconstruction.

However, despite the abovementioned evidence of valuable

changes in Peymans professional identity, he hadnt undergone

changes as profound as those experienced by his classmates since

there was evidence suggesting the yet strong hold of a normative

and instrumentalist view on his ideology. His sense of change

agency, for instance, hadnt grown much stronger as shown in his

reaction to the issue of teachers bringing about changes in the

educational system in the second interview:

Do we have the authority to change? Do we have the power to

change?.Of course not..There have been people around who

know much more than I do and who know better what to do

about this educational system of ours, but even they don t havethe authority to do so.

Also, he seemed to have maintained a highly instrumentalist

view of his own institutional responsibilities as he believed that his

main duty to the language center where he works is to do my best

in order to create an acceptable reputation for the institute and

spread the word and actually get students into that instituteFinally, despite his mention of transformative roles he thought he

should perform as a teacher, he referred to making money and

improving his language ability as his main motivations for teaching

in the post-course interview.

4. Concluding remarks

I never speak about utopia as an impossibility that might, at

times,work out. Even moreso, I donot ever speakabout utopia as

the refuge of thosewho do not take action or as the unreachable

pronunciation of thosewho can only fantasize. I speak of utopia

on the contrary, as a fundamental necessity for human beings. I

is part of their historically and socially constituted nature that

men and women, under normalconditions, must notdo withou

dreaming and utopia.(Freire, 2007,p. 25)

The very emergence of radically different EFL teacher profes-

sionalidentities in the genuine and critical dialogs we had through

interviews, discussions, and journals indicates that the teachers

developed a transformative and utopian vision of teaching EFL

These reconstructed identities and the processes of identity

formation the teachers went through enjoy, to varying degrees andin various ways, a utopian nature. Looking at ELT as a tool for

individuals mental development, social transformation, and

emancipation is not what the status quo favors, since it is basically

against changes at odds with market values and demands

Compared to going against the tide and redening ones teacher

self in line with a transformative ideology, it is more materially

advantageous to stick with the identity assigned to teachers by the

market (Macedo & Freire, 2005), which, in the context of ELT

amounts to reducing oneself to merely helping learners improve

their L2 skills by following empirically proven techniques. More-

over, redening their teacher selves is a toughest job that teachers

who want to qualify as transformative intellectuals must carry out

Teachers with money making and job security at the top of the

agenda are paralyzedwith the fear of consequences of opposing thestatus quo, and, consequently, prefer to take the dystopian path o

conformity, loss of voice, and lack of drive to reclaim their identi-

ties. Given the democratic and dialogical atmosphere of the course

which would encourage critical examination of different ideologies

the participantsadopting a critical and transformative approach to

their career on their own initiative shows a utopian outlook.

Taking a self-reexive approach to this study, Id like to conclude

this paper by raising a number of concerns about the ndings dis-

cussed above and, accordingly, making suggestions for furthe

research in this area. Since the participants were teaching in

different EFL centers andsome were notteachingduring the Second

Language Teaching Methodology course, it was practically impos-

sible to see whether any observable changes happened in their

teaching practice, although a few, like Shiva, reportedsome changes


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in tasks they would assign to their students. There may not be

anything completely different in classroom practices [.] that sets

off radical language teaching from other parts of language teaching(Crookes, 2009b, p. 10), and looking for observable changes in

teaching behavior for evaluating the effectiveness of a teacher

education program may reek of a training-oriented product-based

perspective on teacher education (Richards, 1989). However, since

CP is a pedagogy of praxis and necessitates a combination of

reection and action (Freire,1972) and what teachers know, think,

and even believe can contradicttheir practice in classrooms (Cross,

2010,p. 436), it will be a great contribution to research on critical

TESOL teacher education to study the ways in which it can inuence

different dimensions of teachers teaching conduct, such as class-

room management and assessment of learning outcomes.

The Second Language Teaching Methodology course which

formed the basis of this paper was not part of a typical teacher

education program, in the sense that it was part of a BA English

Translation curriculum. The differences which exist between this

program and typical teacher education programs in terms of

teachers motivations behind participationin teachingmethodology

courses, the context in which the programs are conducted, their

curricula, etc. may raise doubts as to how similar the outcomes of

such a critical approach would be if the course were conducted

within a teacher education program. Although, most of the partici-

pants have remained involved in ELT as their main careerand major

so far, which leads me to consider them similar to those training as

teachers in teacher education programs in terms of serious

involvement in ELT, I tend to believe that different results would

probably be observed if I had done the study in a teacher education

program. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct similar studies on

those who participate in typical programs of teacher education.

Identity is a highly dynamic construct which changes as a result

of individuals interaction with others in the environment. Thus,

studies of this type need to explore long-term changes in teachersidentities, which, with regard to this study, I am going to do

through a follow-up interview with the available participants.

Notwithstanding these limitations, it is hard to deny the above-mentioned effects of a critical and transformative approach on the

EFL teachers professional identities, given the short duration of the

course and the frequent observation that fundamental changes in

teacher identity do not take place easilyand often there seems to

be little changeat allin howteachersview themselves (Korthagen,

2004, p. 85). Theparticipants limited teaching experience (less than

three years) and, thus, more openness to innovative ideas partly

explain why changes were considerable though.

The relevance of any approach to teaching in our area of

language and culture that addresses social justice is obvious to

anyone who sees the world as failing under an ethical analysis (Crookes, 2010, p. 344), no matter what you call it-critical peda-

gogy, transformative education, humanistic education, etc. As

Shakespeare puts it, Whats in a name? That which we call a roseby any other name would smell as sweet(Durband, 1984, p. 85).

Acknowledgment

Many thanks to the enthusiastic participants and Professor

Graham Crookes for his insightful comments on an earlier version

of this article. Any shortcomings, though, are my own.

Appendix I

Course content

1. Theories of learning (Brown, 2000, pp. 78e91); (Williams &

Burden, 1997, p. 30e

45); (Hanley, 1994).

2. Critical pedagogy (Freire, 1972, pp. 45e50)

3. Critical language pedagogy (Akbari, 2008a)

4. Second language teaching approaches and methods (Celce-

Murcia, 2001)

5. Communicative language teaching (Savignon, 2001)

6. Postmethod (Akbari, 2008b; Kumaravadivelu, 2003, pp.

23e43;Kumaravadivelu, 20 06, pp. 176e183; 201e208)

7. English as a lingua franca (Cook, 2003, pp. 21e39)

8. Teaching language skills (Gebhard, 2006, pp. 147e233)

Appendix II

Pre-course Interview framework

A. Biography/background

1. Tell me about yourself and your cultural, linguistic, economic,

educational and family background. What minority group do

you belong to, if any?

2. To what extent is your teaching life in harmony with your

personal life? Is the teacher you are the person you are?

3. How has your background in

uenced your teaching beliefs andconduct?

4. In what contexts have you taught so far?

5. How have your personal problems affected your teaching?

6. Have you attended a teacher training course? Describe it and

explain what you liked and disliked about it?

B. Self-image

1. How do you describe yourself as a teacher?

2. In the past, what type of teacher did you think you would be in

the future? If the answer is different fromthe answerto 1: Why

arent you like that now?

3. How do others describe you as a teacher? To what extent do

you agree with them? Why do you think they describe you this

way? Do their descriptions affect you? How?

4. Please describe one of your past teachers who you favored

most/least?

5. Who else has greatly inuenced your teaching beliefs and

performance? Please explain how they have inuenced you.

C. Self-efcacy

1. How do you evaluate your teaching ability (skills and

knowledge)?

2. How do you evaluate your language ability?

3. How do you compare your abilities with your colleagues?

4. How do you compare your abilities with native teachers?

In what areas are you weaker/stronger than them? Why? Are

these true about all nonnative (NN) teachers (collectiveefcacy)?

5. How do you compare your abilities with (fe)male teachers? In

what areas are you weaker/stronger than them? Why? Are

these true about all (fe)male teachers (collective efcacy)?

6. How do others evaluate you as a teacher?

D. Job motivation

1. What made you choose teaching? What made/might make you

stay in teaching?

2. Do the reasons that you initially had in mind for becoming

a teacher still exist? Which? Why?

3. Is there any possibility of leaving teaching as your main career?

What may make you do so?


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4. How committed do you think you are to your job?

5. How do you improve your teaching knowledge and skills?

E. Task perception

1. How do you dene your job of teaching EFL? What is your

purpose of teaching EFL?

2. What are your main responsibilities as a teacher toward

yourself, your students, your colleagues, curriculum and

materials, educational settings, authorities, and society? Can

you list them in order of importance? Why is . the most/least

important, etc.?

3. In what ways have you affected them?

4. What responsibilities are you assigned by others? Which do

you like and which doyou dislike? Why? How doyou deal with

assigned duties different from your preferences?

5. What skillsdo youthink youshould have/develop to fulll your

responsibilities?

6. What do youwant to changeabout the present situation so that

it will be more in line with your pedagogical ideas?

7. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the materials

you commonly teach? What is your denition of good

materials?8. How do you evaluate the techniques you use to teach

EFL? What are the characteristics of good instructional

techniques?

9. How much freedom do you feel you have in choosing what and

how to teach? How free should you be in doing so?

10. What institutional policies limit/widen the scope of your

decision making and independence? How do you deal with

them?

11. To what extent do you affect the context where you work? To

what extent does it affect you?

12. How do you feel when your classroom performance is

observed?

13. How do you feel about your relationship with your colleagues?

What should it involve?14. How much professional communication and interaction do you

have with your colleagues and authorities? What should it be

like?

15. Please explain the most critical experiences, including tensions

and reforms, you have lived through in your teaching career

and your learning? How have they affected you?

16. How do you deal with tensions/changes/innovations that you

experience in your workplace?

17. Who has power in your classroom and how is it expressed?

F. Future perspective

1. What do you think will happen in the future with regard

to your development of teaching in terms of quality, scope,etc.?

2. What type of teacher do you want to be in the future?

G. The emotional aspect of professional identity

1. When do you usually feel . as a teacher?

a) Angry

b) Frustrated

c) Uncondent

d) Disempowered

e) Satised

f) Excited

g) Confused

h) Self-condent

Appendix III

Post-course Interview framework

A. Biography/background

1. How much is your teaching life in harmony with your persona

life? Is the teacher you are the person you are?

2. How has your background inuenced your teaching beliefs and

conduct?

3. How have your personal problems affected your teaching?

4. Have you attended any TTC? Describe it and explain what you

liked and disliked about it?

B. Self-image

1. How do you describe yourself as a teacher?

2. Please describe one of your past teachers who you favored

most/least?

3. Who else has greatly inuenced your teaching beliefs and

performance? Please explain how they have inuenced you.

C. Self-efcacy

1. How do you evaluate your teaching ability (skills and

knowledge)?

2. How do you evaluate your language ability?

3.How do you compare your abilities with your colleagues?

4. How do you compare your abilities with native teachers ?

In what areas are you weaker/stronger than them? Why?

Are these true about all nonnative teachers (collective

efcacy)?

5. How do you compare your abilities with (fe)male teachers? In

what areas are you weaker/stronger than them? Why? Are

these true about all (fe)male teachers (collective efcacy)?

D. Job motivation

1. What made/might make you stay in teaching?

2. What may lead you to leave it?

3. How do you evaluate your commitment to teaching?

4. How do you think you should improve your teaching knowl-

edge and skills?

E. Task perception

1. How do you dene your job of teaching EFL? What is your

purpose of teaching EFL?

2. What are your main responsibilities as a teacher toward

yourself, your students, your colleagues, curriculum and

materials, educational settings, authorities, and society? Canyou list them in order of importance? Why is . the most/leas

important, etc.?

3. In what ways have you affected them? In what ways do you

think you can affect them? (change agency)

4. What responsibilities are you assigned by others? Which do

you like and which doyou dislike? Why? How doyou deal with

assigned duties different from your preferences? Why?

5. What skillsdo youthink you should have/develop to fulll your

responsibilities?

6. What do you want to changeabout the present situationso tha

it will be more in line with your pedagogical ideas?

7. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the materials

you commonly teach? What is your denition of good

materials?


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8. How do you evaluate the techniques you use to teach L2? What

are the characteristics of good instructional techniques? What

techniques would you like to implement in your classes?

9. How much freedom do you feel you have in choosing what and

how to teach? How free should you be in doing so?

10. What institutional policies limit/widen the scope of your

decision making and independence? How do you deal with

them?

11. To what extent do you affect the context where you work? To

what extent does it affect you?

12. How do you feel about your relationship with your colleagues?

What should it involve?

13. What should your professional communication and interaction

with your colleagues and authorities be like?

14. How do you deal with tensions/changes/innovations that you

experience in your workplace?

15. Who has power in your classroom and how is it expressed?

F. Future perspective

1. What do you think will happen in the future with regard

to your development of teaching in terms of quality, scope,

etc.?2. What type of teacher do you want to be in the future?

G. Emotional aspect of professional identity

1. When do you usually feel . as a teacher?

a) Angry

b) Frustrated

c) Uncondent

d) Disempowered

e) Satised

f) Excited

g) Confused

h) Self-condent

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