Novice EFL Teachers' Preconceptions of Teaching English: A Case Study of Iranian Private Institutes

As a growing trend in the cognitive approach to teaching, exploring teachers’ preconceptions can help to reveal various underlying dimensions that could leave significant impacts on the teaching process. Such preconceptions, of course, are very important in the case of novice teachers, particularly English as foreign language (EFL) ones, who have started to shape or re-shape their ideas about teaching. This study investigated Iranian EFL novice teachers’ preconceptions at private institutes, following three purposes: (a) it tried to find any possibly existing underlying preconceptions about teaching in the teachers; (b) it sought to detect any similar patterns in their ideas; and (c) it intended to find the metaphorical expressions the teachers used to share their experiences of teaching English. To trace any similarities in the novice teachers' preconceptions, copies of a questionnaire including twelve items werecompleted by a sample of novice EFL teachers (۴۳ males/females). The data analysis revealed five factors underlying the preconceptions: learning, students' problem solving, teachers' role, instruction, and good teacher. Moreover, to investigate the metaphorical expressions, ۲۰-miniute semi-structured interviews were arranged with five EFL novice teachers. The interviews revealed that the participants employed metaphors in sharing their teaching-related experiences.

Keywords:

preconception , Metaphor , novice teachers , EFL Teachers , cognitive psychology