A case study of EFL teachers’ attitudes toward gender related differences of language learners

Teacher cognition research is an important field of enquiry in applied linguistics. The importance of taking into account teachers’ own attitudes and viewpoints has long been recognized as a valuable area of study because we can only discover some important issues if we study teachers’ mentality toward those issues to find out how they see them and affect them and are affected by them. The aim of this explorativequalitative case study is to discover two EFL teachers’ attitudes toward gender related differences of their language learners. It attempts to share their ideas. After classroom observations two EFL teachers were interviewed. We came to see that learners’ gender can affect the teaching-learning process in some ways. During the interview the participants mentioned some differences between their male and female languagelearners such as motivation, organization, activity, and other differences in the classroom.

Keywords:

teacher cognition , EFL teachers’ attitudes , learners’ gender differences