Education
Seyed Behrouz Behzadi; Nasser Rashidi
Abstract
Teacher cognition, as a chief area within teacher education, is concerned with what teachers think, know, and do (Borg, 2003). One of the knotty strands emerging out of the past 50 or so years of research on teacher cognition is the misalignment between teachers’ cognition and practice. This study ...
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Teacher cognition, as a chief area within teacher education, is concerned with what teachers think, know, and do (Borg, 2003). One of the knotty strands emerging out of the past 50 or so years of research on teacher cognition is the misalignment between teachers’ cognition and practice. This study adopted a critical interpretative synthesis framework to identify factors generating such incongruence by dissecting 12 studies reporting on teachers’ cognition vis-à-vis their practice. The emerging themes were translated into each other and synthesised to form two lines of argument. The first one describes sources of teachers’ cognition and practice as ontological, epistemological, and contextual. Teachers’ apprenticeship of observation was found to exert the highest influence in fashioning their cognition and practice by sifting professional learning experiences and granting admission to only those commensurate with personal learning experiences. The second line of argument propounds that connate, personal, and contextual factors breed (mis)alignment into teachers’ cognition and practice. Furthermore, Cartesian dualism (Descartes, 1596-1650) and Heideggerianhermeneutic phenomenology (Heidegger, 1889-1976) were utilised to critically de- and re-territorialise the developed lines of argument. This interpretive conceptualisation of teacher cognition is rooted in but patently transcends the original studies in that it invites a fresh demarcation of the territory intensely occupied by contextual factors to allow teachers to practice ‘cogito, ergo I teach’. Finally, some suggestions are offered for the relevance of the results to teacher cognition research and teacher education and policy.
Second Language Acquisition (SLA)
Nasser Rashidi; Amir Naami
Abstract
This article was intended to investigate and compare the impact of three types of verbalization within Systemic Theoretical Instruction on the L2 learners’ knowledge of past voice. To this end, four EFL intact classrooms from a high school in Iran were chosen and randomly assigned to one control ...
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This article was intended to investigate and compare the impact of three types of verbalization within Systemic Theoretical Instruction on the L2 learners’ knowledge of past voice. To this end, four EFL intact classrooms from a high school in Iran were chosen and randomly assigned to one control and three experimental groups. The experimental groups received their respective treatment, that is, communicated thinking, dialogic thinking and, communicated plus dialogic thinking while the control group received instruction about the same target structure, here, passive voice through a deductive lesson. The first part of the result proved that STI in its all conceptualizations was an effective pedagogical option. The result also showed that communicated and communicated plus dialogic procedures had an advantage over the dialogic one both in the immediate and delayed posttests. This finding could be attributed to the unique nature of communicated thinking combining the mediation through concepts of STI with the mediation through interaction of dynamic assessment.
Nasser Rashidi; Nurullah Mansourzadeh
Abstract
The profession of second language teaching has experienced fundamental fluctuations in both theory and practice. With its own proponents and opponents, the postmethod was considered as the practical and reasonable solution to the limitations of the confining concept of the method. The purpose of this ...
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The profession of second language teaching has experienced fundamental fluctuations in both theory and practice. With its own proponents and opponents, the postmethod was considered as the practical and reasonable solution to the limitations of the confining concept of the method. The purpose of this qualitative study was to elicit nonnative EFL teachers’ viewpoints and perceptions regarding postmethod pedagogy. In fact, the researchers were interested to know about nonnative EFL teachers’ perceptions of postmethod condition regarding their own context and needs. Selected based on purposive sampling procedure, the participants of this study were 10 nonnative EFL teachers categorized into three groups based on their teaching experience. The participants took part in semi-structured interviews and they were asked a series of questions to elicit their perceptions and interpretations of postmethod. The results of the study revealed some rays of hope in some cases, though not promising in a full manner. In other words, although nonnative EFL teachers could not mention the postmethod principles explicitly, they showed a logical understanding of postmethod pedagogy tenets and its applications in their teaching practices and procedures. The results of this study can help teacher educators design more effective teacher education courses and in-service programs to enhance nonnative EFL teachers’ viewpoints and perceptions regarding postmethod pedagogy and its implications in language teaching and learning processes.
Nasser Rashidi; Ali Forutan
Abstract
Teacher supervision plays a pivotal role in the improvement of education system and the way in which teachers and student teachers perceive it. Consequently language teacher supervisors can utilize appropriate supervisory models to keep teachers update and promote them professionally. The present study ...
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Teacher supervision plays a pivotal role in the improvement of education system and the way in which teachers and student teachers perceive it. Consequently language teacher supervisors can utilize appropriate supervisory models to keep teachers update and promote them professionally. The present study investigated the role of language teacher supervisors in student teachers and in-service teachers’ professional development in Iran. To have a representative sample, some 210 EFL teachers practicing in the secondary schools and a total of 215EFL student teachers studying English at some Iranian state and Azad universities participated in the study. A 43-item questionnaire regarding EFL teachers’ attitudes about the impact of supervisory practice on their professional development with a format of a 5-point Likert-type was distributed among them. Also, ten percent of the participants were interviewed. Then the frequencies related to each item were calculated and a Chi-Square was used. Subsequently, qualitative data were transcribed. The results indicated that in-service and pre-service teachers have the same perceptions towards the role of their supervisors in their professional development. However, according to the findings it was concluded that the models of language teacher supervision in language teacher education are different from the models practiced in in-service classes where mostly traditional models are common.
Nasser Rashidi; Mohammad Rahimi; Zahra Alimorad
Volume 2, Issue 1 , June 2013, , Pages 101-124
Abstract
Although Gardner and his associates’ work was most influential in the field of L2 motivation, from the early 1990s onwards, their work has been criticized for several reasons. Some researchers claimed that integrative and instrumental orientations were no longer able to convey the complexity of ...
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Although Gardner and his associates’ work was most influential in the field of L2 motivation, from the early 1990s onwards, their work has been criticized for several reasons. Some researchers claimed that integrative and instrumental orientations were no longer able to convey the complexity of the L2 motivation construct. To examine this complexity, the present study attempted to investigate the discursive construction of four (two males and two females) Iranian EFL learners’ motivation at Shiraz University, Iran. Employing van Leeuwen’s (2008) legitimation construction framework, the study revealed that depending on their future selves, each participant employed certain discursive strategies unique to him/her to (de)legitimize his/her future self. Therefore, what was observed was the use of strategies which were idiosyncratic to that particular person, in that particular context, for a specific purpose, and for that particular moment. Additionally, given the unique political conditions of Iran in the world, it was found that integrative and instrumental orientations can be best replaced by ideal and ought-to selves in this context. The study has some implications. Motivation researchers need to broaden the unit of analysis beyond the individual learner to the interaction between the individual and the multitude of factors in diverse social settings.