Abstract:
The need for a strong educational system is felt more than ever due to globalization. In this respect, teacher agency has an important role in educational change. This qualitative meta-study, therefore, addressed the attitude of the teachers towards agency and the way they enact agency to facilitate learning process. To this purpose, the needed data were gathered from the narrative of life, professional history and class observations of five English teachers in Iranian context. Then, based on the Grounded Theory Approach, the data were analyzed and the obtained results showed that teachers’ pre-teaching and during teaching processes were made up of complex relationships among different resources; that is, teachers’ life ideology (their perception towards themselves and their job) and financial status. At the same time, the results revealed that teachers’ instruction experiences highly affect both their magnification of agency and their decision-making processes. It was further seen that agency was not stable at all, meaning that social factors and environmental conditions played important roles in shaping teacher’s agency.
Machine summary:
An Exploratory Study of Iranian EFL Teachers’ Agency: Conceptions and Practices Fatemeh Soghra Kordabadi, English Language Department, Ahar Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ahar, Iran kordabadifateme@yahoo.
Then, based on the Grounded Theory Approach, the data were analyzed and the obtained results showed that teachers’ pre-teaching and during teaching processes were made up of complex relationships among different resources; that is, teachers’ life ideology (their perception towards themselves and their job) and financial status.
Language teachers, especially English as Foreign Language teachers (EFL), apply agency to make choices, affect, oppose, or take positions; hence, they achieve different objectives in distinctive contexts (Ruohotie-Lyhty and Moate, 2016).
Based on what was stated above, the present study aimed to focus on the EFL context of Iran and, using Grounded Theory Approach, thoroughly explore the causes of the EFL teachers’ agency in the language classes and the consequences that this type of agency may have on the quality of teaching from their own perspective.
Actually, little attention has been paid to the issue of EFL teacher agency by Iranian researchers, specifically in relation to teaching quality in the context of academic arena.
The present study, therefore, tried to fill this gap by exploring those critical factors that constitute to the professional agency of English as Foreign Language (EFL) teacher from the perspectives of the EFL participant teachers.
Procedures In order to address the questions of how EFL teachers in public schools describe their understandings of agency phenomenon, some qualitative information on the viewpoints of these English language teachers towards the agency and the factors related to it was needed.