Comparison between Iran’s Policy Documents and Teachers’ Actual Beliefs Regarding the Notion of Teacher’s Role; Matches and Mismatches

Document Type : research article

Authors

Department of English, Faculty of Foreign Languages & Literatures, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

On account of the fact that there might be a conflict between "teachers' roles" as imagined by policy makers and curriculum developers and "values" as preferred by teachers, the present study tries to analyze language teaching policy documents on the one hand and to examine the interviews with the high school teachers on the other hand, in relation to the notion of the teachers’ role. This study represents a design which is qualitative in nature and to do so, four national policy documents bearing policy messages for English language education have been investigated as sources of overt national policies. In addition, in order to investigate how teachers interpret and articulate the policy in their classrooms, nine secondary high school classes in different cities of Iran have been observed using ethnographic methods and then the teachers of these classes have also been interviewed. As the next step, the Alignment between teachers’ policy interpretations and policy documents messages regarding teachers’ roles has been stated. The findings of this study reveal that even though there is a rather considerable consistency between policy documents and teachers’ perception of policy, what the teachers actually do in class depends much more on the context’s expediency rather than policy expectations.

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References

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Journal of Foreign Language Research
Volume 14, Issue 1
June 2024
Pages 1-14

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