Exploring EFL Instructors’ Metacognitive Strategy Use

Metacognition is one of the most popular concepts in the literature playing a pivotal role in teachers’ education (Jiang,Ma, & Gao, 2016). People vary widely in their metacognitive ability, and in general they are so confident whenevaluating their performance (Molenberghs et al., 2016). The purpose of this study was to examine the EFL instructors’knowledge and use of metacognitive strategies. The participants were 63 EFL instructors at the Iran University ofScience and Technology. The instrument of this study was Teacher Metacognition Inventory questionnaire. Aninterview with six questions was also conducted to assess the metacognitive knowledge and use of English languageteachers. The results revealed that with regard to metacognitive strategy use, the highest agreement was obtained by‘when I successfully complete the classroom teaching task, I feel very relaxing’ (98.4%), while the lowest one wasobtained by ‘I am worried that I cannot control the pace of classroom teaching well’. Considering categories ofmetacognitive strategy knowledge, ‘metacognitive knowledge about pedagogy’ and ‘teacher metacognitive monitoring’received the highest mean, whereas ‘teacher metacognitive planning’ received the lowest mean. EFL Teachers arerecommended to self-evaluate their metacognitive knowledge and try to enhance their metacognitive skills to motivatetheir students for further learning.

Keywords:

English language teacher , reflection , monitoring , teacher education , teacher metacognitive knowledge