Examining The Relationship Between Iranian English Language Teachers’ Oops-Moment Strategies and Their Personality Traits and Teaching Experience

This study attempted to investigate the most common oops-moment strategies of 11 Iranian novices and experienced English language teachers at private institutes in Zanjan, Iran, so as to find possible relationships among their oops-moment strategies, their personality, and teaching experience. To gather data about how they deal with hard questions in their English class, they were interviewed in their workplace. Their students were also interviewed in order to verify their teachers’ claims. For the purpose of gathering the data related to teachers’ personality, the ‘Big Five’ test of personality was utilized. The interviews were transcribed and imported to Nvivo 8 software for analyzing and coding the data, and the scores on the personality test were examined using IBM SPSS statistics 20. This research proposes five most commonly-used strategies among teachers including asking for time and checking the answer, confessing lack of knowledge, explaining the rules and the related information, asking smart students to answer the question, and postponing answering the question. The last strategy was found to be commonly used by novice teachers, the first and third strategies were mostly reported by experienced teachers. The findings also showed that the teachers who were open to experience and agreeable according to the personality test tended to use the second strategy, those who appeared to be emotionally unstable reported to use the first and the last strategies, and finally the teachers who were conscientious and extrovert tended to confess their lack of knowledge. The pedagogical implications are also discussed.