چکیده:
Teacher education programs can play a principal role in helping prospective teachers to acquire requisite knowledge and skills. Vital to the issue of teacher education is the efficient evaluation of such programs in promoting prospective teachers’ knowledge base. However, the literature contains very few reports of the evaluation of the Iranian EFL preservice teacher education program, which is a gap to be addressed by this study. To this end, 346 high school EFL teachers, 20 EFL teacher educators, and 97 teacher trainees took part in the study. A questionnaire, semistructured interviews, tests, and an observation checklist were utilized. A mixed methods design was employed to evaluate the program. The results of the questionnaire, tests, and observation checklist were analyzed quantitatively. For the interview results, both quantitative (percentages) and qualitative analyses were deployed. Findings indicated that the program was not satisfactory in enhancing the EFL teacher trainees’ pedagogical content knowledge.
خلاصه ماشینی:
EFL Teacher Education in Iran: Does It Promote Trainees’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge?1 Amin Khanjani2, Fereidoon Vahdany3, & Manoochehr Jafarigohar4 Received: 22/10/2015 Accepted: 13/10/2016 Abstract Teacher education programs can play a principal role in helping prospective teachers to acquire requisite knowledge and skills.
Research on pedagogical content knowledge, in fact, can help professionalization by developing new standards for the specification of the content of EFL teacher education programs (Guntermann, 1993).
Considering the pivotal role of preservice teacher education in teacher trainees’ professional development (Ogilvie & Dunn, 2010), we conducted this study to examine its efficiency in promoting trainees’ pedagogical content knowledge and skills.
So far, most studies on preservice EFL teacher education programs either have been concerned with the perceptions of the teacher trainees/trainers regarding the adequacy of the program (Cosgun-Ogeyik, 2009; Mirhassani & Beh-Afarin, 2004; Peacock, 2009) or have targeted EFL teachers’ knowledge base (Akbari & Dadvand, 2014).
Accordingly, the different parts of the questionnaire were developed to target some recently focused aspects of pedagogical content knowledge of the EFL teachers, including academic reading skills, assessment literacy, computer skills, research skills, lesson planning, and classroom management.
Eighteen teacher educators’ classes in different courses of the program, namely Academic Reading, Materials Development and Course Design, Teaching Methodology, Research Methodology, Assessment Methodology, Practicum, and Computer courses in teacher education centers were observed.
In addition, to probe into the application of the pedagogical content knowledge in high schools, 18 teacher trainees’ teaching practice on reading comprehension and grammar in Practicum courses and 18 high school EFL teachers’ practice in actual high school classes were observed.