Investigating EFL Student-teachers’ Possible Self within the Iranian Teacher Education Context

Document Type : research article

Authors

1 English Language Department, Farhangian University, Tehran, Iran

2 Department of English Language and Literature , University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

As the teacher’s role in language learners’ success has always been highly significant, their individual characteristic features have been the focus of attention from different aspects. Among the different features, identity growth is one of the most complicated issues in the applied linguistics domain. The reason is that deciding to learn a second or foreign language brings about a great many changes in one’s value and motivation system which in turn may lead to significant identity changes and professional development. Therefore, the current research aimed at investigating an important need of Iranian EFL student-teachers in developing their possible self in light of “the possible-self theory” using quantitative and survey method. To this end, the English teachers’ possible-self questionnaire including three sections to measure ideal, ought to, and feared selves developed and validated by Karimi and Norouzi (2019) was distributed among 141 student-teachers using random sampling. The researchers made use of Friedman and Mann-whiney tests and the results showed that the participants’ vision of their ideal-self ranked first compared to their ought to-self and their feared-self vision which ranked second and third respectively. The findings of this study benefit EFL student-teachers, teacher educators, professors, curriculum developers and lay the ground for their possible self-perception.

Keywords

References

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Journal of Foreign Language Research
Volume 10, Issue 3
November 2020
Pages 498-511

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