THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CRITICAL THINKING AND TEACHING STYLE AMONG IRANIAN EFL TEACHERS WITH A FOCUS ON THEIR YEARS OF TEACHING EXPERIENCE

Myriads of studies on critical thinking have been conducted so far; however, to the best of the researchers’ knowledge, there are no published studies in the literature addressing the relationship between teachers’ critical thinking and their teaching styles in EFL context, particularly in Iran. Thus, the purpose of this study was first to investigate whether there was any relationship between Iranian EFL teachers’ critical thinking and their teaching styles, and then to explore if there were any significant differences between novice and experienced Iranian EFL teachers in their critical thinking and teaching styles. To this end, ۱۰۰ Iranian EFL teachers (۴۱ males and ۵۹ females) from high schools and private language institutes in Shiraz and Kazeroon were selected through convenience sampling. The participants were divided into novice and experienced groups based on their years of teaching experience. To measure critical thinking, a Critical Thinking Questionnaire adopted from Naeini (۲۰۰۵), which, in turn, was adopted from Honey (۲۰۰۴), was employed. Grasha-Reichmann Teaching Style Inventory (۱۹۹۶) was also utilized to gauge the teachers’ teaching styles. Both Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient and the Independent Samples t-tests were run to analyze the data. The results demonstrated a moderately positive relationship between teachers’ critical thinking and their teaching styles. These results also revealed that the experienced teachers’ critical thinking level was significantly higher than that of the novice teachers. Nevertheless, the findings also indicated that the experienced and the novice teachers were not different in terms of their teaching styles. Finally, the pedagogical implications of the study were listed.

Keywords:

critical thinking , teaching styles , Iranian EFL teachers , experienced and novice teachers