Abstract:
To explore Iranian professionally developed English teachers’ passion for the English language teaching profession, an interview with 7 open-ended questions was conducted to 14 Iranian professionally developed teachers to discover what factors were at work in their professional growth. Participants included 8 Ph.D. holders, 3 Ph.D. candidates, and 3 M.A. holders in TEFL who had more than 20 years of service in the Iranian context and were chosen by purposive sampling. After interviewing the participants via a standard interview and delving deeply into the emotional aspects of their professional journey throughout their lives, the following factors emerged from the analysis of the transcriptions of the interviews as reasons to have and sustain passion for language teaching profession: acceptance of change, cooperating with colleagues, being a model, establishing relationships, helping the students, meeting personal needs, contributing to the society, and love of learning/language
Machine summary:
After interviewing the participants via a standard interview and delving deeply into the emotional aspects of their professional journey throughout their lives, the following factors emerged from the analysis of the transcriptions of the interviews as reasons to have and sustain passion for language teaching profession: acceptance of change, cooperating with colleagues, being a model, establishing relationships, helping the students, meeting personal needs, contributing to the society, and love of learning/language.
New waves of social aspects of teacher learning have swept over language teacher education in recent years under the banner of the sociocultural theory (Freeman, 2004; Freeman & Johnson, 2005; Golombek & Johnson, 2004; Johnson, 2006; Johnson, 2009; Johnson & Golombek, 2011), poststructural, postmodern, and globalization perspectives (Kumaravadivelu, 2012) and, lately, the emotional parts of teachers’ learning have come to the fore (Golombek & Doran, 2014).
Because teaching practice is deeply embedded in emotional experiences (Hargreaves, 1998; Nias, 1996), passion is deemed as a driving force for productive professional performance and plays a pivotal part to prevent teacher burnout (Vallerand, Paquet, Philippe, & Charest, 2010).
What follows were the nine factors that emotionally triggered the Iranian language teachers to sustain their passion in their professional life: love of learning, contributing to society, helping the students, establishing relationships, meeting personal needs, cooperating with colleagues, being a model, acceptance of change, and teaching the English language itself.