Investigating Structure and Steps of Iranian EFL Teachers Reflective Diaries Genre

Reflective practice has become a prominent issue in EFL teacher education programs throughout the world. The present study was conducted to analyze the structures and steps of Iranian EFL teachers written diaries genre. To this aim, 20 female EFL teachers with 5-10 years of English teaching experiences from different institutes of Gorgan teaching at intermediate level participated in the study. They were asked to write their reflective diaries on their instruction at the end of each session during a semester. Totally, 100 written diaries (5 from each teacher) were collected. Genre-based analysis of the teachers diaries revealed that approximately all of the teachers followed a rather structured line of stages in their writing. They started with describing their specific teaching experience, continued by evaluating their methods, activities, even discourse and mentioning their strengths and weaknesses by analyzing them, and then closed their writings with a conclusion part suggesting some possible remedies to fill their gaps in future teaching experiences. In fact this paper tried to extract some steps or moves in teacher reflective diary genre from the written samples of the teacher participants. An implication of the study is to provide explicit training of the use of reflective diary genre in teacher training. In addition, teachers should be encouraged to use reflective writing as part of their daily professional teaching experiences for the purpose of evaluating their teaching acts

Keywords:

reflective diary genre , genre analysis