A Study on Teacher’s Optimal Behavior in Teaching French to Children in Iran

French as a foreign language is taught to young language learners by graduates and university students of this field in non-profit institutions and primary schools, and partly in the state institute of the Iran Language Institute (Kanoon Zaban Iran). Considering the positive effect of teacher training courses on improving the teaching process, however, we encounter that in some institutions and schools of Iran, teachers are still teaching this language relying only on their university education in different fields of French, without passing any training course. This descriptiveanalytical study used a questionnaire to examine the current situation of teachers in terms of age, gender, university education (field of study), teacher training courses and type of educational institution they work in and based on the studies of Vanthier (2009) tried to review optimal behavior in trained and untrained teachers so as to determine the differences between the two groups regarding this index. Optimal behavior is in fact a set of classroom management methods that are approved by experts and developers of language teaching methods. The findings of this quantitative study, performed on 83 teachers through descriptive and inferential statistics (independent t-test, Pearson correlation, Spearman, ANOVA), showed that more than fifty percent had not completed any special training courses for children. There was also a significant difference in the optimal behavior score of teachers in the two groups. This difference was only significant in regards to the training and teachers of the state institutions and had no significant relationship with age, gender, level of education and study fields of the teachers.