Iranian EFL Teachers’ Attitudes towards Using Multimodal Instruction of Vocabulary

The present paper aimed at investigating the perceptions of EFL teachers at schools and language institutes towards multimodality. The reason for choosing vocabulary as this study’s focus was the way vocabulary is being instructed which usually requires specific strategies. In addition, teaching words for Iranian EFL teachers has always been a daunting and disconcerting task. The researcher through a qualitative design tried to find out the attitudes of EFL teachers regarding the use of multimodal training. A 25 item, Likert scale questionnaire designed by the researcher was used to collect data from 93 male and female EFL teachers at different schools and language institutes in Iran. The researcher using statistical analyses including frequency and means analyzed the data. The results highlighted that Iranian teachers both in institutes and school chose multimodal instruction over traditional way of teaching. In addition, most teachers preferred to use multimodal input when teaching vocabulary elements. Teachers showed more resistance to using traditional methods of teaching vocabulary subjects. School teachers, on the other hand, did not have the same ability to prepare multimodal teaching materials as their corresponding institute teachers, who were more equipped with technical tools. Finally, it should be mentioned that the multimodal vocabulary teaching tools seems more suitable for EFL classes. This study has great implications for English teachers across different settings in general and for EFL pedagogy developers in particular, to lean more on multimodal tools in the course of vocabulary instruction since multimodal learning offers new ways of teaching English vocabulary.