Despite the widely recognized significance of values education in a rapidly changing world and teachers’ education-related beliefs, little research has investigated how English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers navigate values in their classrooms. The study reported in this paper explored in-service EFL teachers’ perceptions of values education and their conceptions of their moral roles, aiming to develop an instrument related to values education. To this end, this exploratory sequential mixed-methods study recruited 10 EFL teachers selected through maximum variation sampling. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the teacher participants and the data were analyzed inductively through thematic analysis. Furthermore, the existing literature and the insights gleaned from the initial phase of the study led to the development of a questionnaire, which was administered to 332 EFL teachers in the quantitative phase of the study. Six overarching themes were identified through thematic analysis of the interview data, namely relational values, personal growth, academic excellence, regulatory values, teachers’ personal standards and global values with teachers prioritizing students’ motivation and wellbeing over other value types. In addition, confirmatory factor analysis of the developed questionnaire verified a five-factor structure. Only 23 items out of 53 initial items were retained in the final version of the questionnaire. Overall, the results revealed that master obligation of teachers, associated with nurturing students’ dignity was prioritized over teachers’ prima facie obligation which promotes students’ learning and intellectual growth. After a detailed discussion, implications and suggestions for future research are presented in the end.

The study investigated how five in-service EFL teachers in a private English Institute in Sanandaj, Kurdistan Province, in an Iranian EFL context, during four quarters of an academic year, engaged in a continuing professional development program launched by its supervisor using reflective video-mediated practices and journal writing. The participant teachers who were chosen based on their educational background and their experiences, engaged in a series of thematic discussions guided by their supervisor for about 20 sessions over four consecutive semesters. The data for the study was collected through observation of their video-mediated teaching practices, audio-recorded focal group discussions, audio-recorded interviews, and their reflective journals on a Telegram group. The findings, obtained from a constant comparative analysis of the data, indicated that the participants scaffolded their reflective practices, reconceptualized their views of teaching concepts and practices and reshaped their professional identity continuously and on a sustainable basis. As a longitudinal case study, the findings of the study can help private EFL school administrators reconsider their continuing professional development strategies and consequently, it has useful implications for training in-service EFL teachers at private EFL institutes.

Distance education pedagogy to be successful requires teachers with different levels of computer, information, and multimedia literacy. Teacher's computer literacy has caught considerable attention due to the great opportunities provided by modern technology for promoting language education. The present study explored computer, information, and multimedia literacy of 255 Iranian EFL teachers. To collect data, we developed and validated Computer, Information, and Multimedia Literacy Questionnaire for EFL Teachers (CIM-LQ for EFL Teachers), a five-point Likert scale questionnaire containing three sections to examine the participant's responses. The obtained data were analyzed using SPSS software version 20. The findings revealed that the level of EFL teacher's multimedia and information literacy ranged from low to moderate which necessitates improving teacher's training courses and preparing them for implementing technologies in real language teaching contexts. The findings have implications for both teacher education programs including both pre-service and in-service teacher training courses and EFL teacher's practice.

Teachers’ knowledge base refers to what teachers should know and be able to implement in their classes. This study investigated to what extent in-service education and training (INSET) courses were influential in developing teachers’ knowledge base. From different models, the researchers selected Mishra and Koehler’s (2006) technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) model that assumes an interrelationship between the components of teachers’ knowledge base. Thus, an exploratory sequential mixed methods study was designed in three phases. In the first phase, the questionnaire of English Language Teacher’s Knowledge Base (ELTKB) was developed and validated with 335 randomly selected EFL teachers from Guilan province. In the second phase, the quantitative follow-up phase, twenty-nine 11th grade EFL teachers’ knowledge base improvement was examined after attending online INSET classes. The results of the paired sample t-tests revealed statistically significant differences between the participants’ knowledge base components before and after the courses. In the third phase, semi-structured interviews explored the participants’ viewpoints concerning the content of the INSET courses. The teachers’ perceptions declared in interview sessions were not in complete conformity with the results obtained from the second phase of the study. The teachers had some complaints about the content of the courses and provided some suggestions. The findings of this study can benefit teacher educators, policymakers, INSET programmers, and English teachers. Also, the ELTKB can be employed by researchers as a valid tool for measuring TPACK that is an essential concept for explaining the relationship between teachers’ content, pedagogy, and technology-related knowledge.

This study focused on examining EFL pre-service teachers’ perception and experience on the implementation of project-based learning strategy to develop pedagogical competence and how EFL pre-service teachers can design ICT-based classroom instruction. An evaluative case study approach was used and six pre-service teachers in higher education level who were taking an English instructional technology course at a private university in Indonesia were involved. The data were collected from semi-structured interviews, fieldnotes, and learners’ diaries. Thematic analysis was used to interpret the data. The findings showed that based on pre-service teachers’ perception and experience, Project-Based Learning strategies are successful in developing their pedagogical competence within the context of English instructional technology, in which EFL pre-service teachers could create English instruction or lesson plan. Moreover, this study suggested that through Project-Based Learning, EFL pre-service teachers could integrate Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in designing ICT-based classroom instruction design. Thus, this study recommends that incorporating ICT into PjBL is effective in improving pre-service teachers’ instruction design.

This study tried to specify the extent to which Iranian EFL instructors’ teacher immunity was influenced by their affective factors. To this end, first, the researchers selected 129 (61 male & 68 female) EFL teachers from among the teachers at diverse language institutes, high schools, and universities in Urmia as the participants of the study. Second, they used an emotional intelligence questionnaire, a personality scale, and a teacher immunity questionnaire in order to determine the participants’ emotional intelligence, personality traits, and teacher immunity, respectively, during a three-week period of time. The results of the study accentuated that the participants’ emotional intelligence, along with their neuroticism, openness to experience, and conscientiousness personality traits made unique contributions to explaining their teacher immunity in descending order of statistical significance. The researchers ascribed the obtained results to the close affinity between the aforementioned affective factors and the sub-components of teacher immunity. The results may assist the teacher education course developers to overhaul the pre-service and in-service teacher education courses in foreign language contexts.

Since English is the language of science and lack of familiarity with it will lead to problems, learning this language is a necessity. Therefore, learning English has become a major concern among most Iranian families. Because students spend countless opportunities in English language classes, they do not reach a favorable level of ability. The present researcher aimed to evaluate the degree of success or failure of the ministery of education in teaching English languge to the students. Therefore, while the present resrarcher evaluated the English textbooks of high schools of this country, he, based on the grounded theory, invited 174 Iranian English language teachers to two semistructures interviews. MAXQDA was used for data analysis. The results showed that some factors as extreme Iranianization of English textbooks, the lack of follow-up evaluation on determined educational goals, delayed start of education, the lack of attention to the bilingualism phenomenon, the lack of English language teachers competencies, the allocation of little time to teach English in schools, the lack of richmess and sufficiency of in-service training courses are considered to be the main causes of the inefficiency of schools in teaching English language. The results of this study are very useful for English languguage teachers and in particular for English language planners and administrators.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the perception of EFL teachers and learners on the fundamental principles and constructs of critical thinking, the main characteristics of a critical thinker, and strategies for reinforcing critical thinking ability. Semi-structured interviews with eight EFL teachers and ten learners, who were theoretically sampled from three different contexts of public, private, and seminary schools in Sabzevar and Qom, Iran, were conducted using the constructivist grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2008). Using the MAXQDA software version 12, the data were analyzed based on the three levels of the open, axial, and selective coding of grounded theory. A model of critical thinking was proposed with ELT teachers’ and learners’ awareness as the core category and the characteristics of a critical thinker and strategies for reinforcing critical thinking ability as sub-categories. The results of the study revealed several pedagogical implications for EFL teachers to help their learners develop critical thinking skills, for EFL learners to think more deeply, solve problems better, communicate and collaborate more effectively, and for curriculum developers and syllabus designers to put certain critical thinking activities in textbooks and support in-service classes for teachers

Pedagogical beliefs as an important concept in psychology are one of the most influential and decisive factors in learners’ success. Recently, teacher beliefs have attracted the attention of many researchers in English language teaching contexts; therefore, the current study investigated non-native novice English Language Teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and the extent to which their pedagogical beliefs modified in the first year of their teaching experience in comparison to pre-service teachers. The required data were collected through a belief questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. Although the results of the questionnaire demonstrated that there were statistically significant differences between pre-service and novice teachers, the findings of qualitative data illustrated that the majority of pedagogical beliefs were reformed. The findings indicated that several factors stimulated reformation in teachers’ beliefs; the overlooked importance of teachers’ role in materials development; lack of teaching practices in teacher education programs; cultural and contextual factors; and assessment procedure. Therefore, teachers need authority and power in educational contexts; teacher educators should specify a specific time to teaching practices to pre-determine the possible problems of the actual teaching practices in the classrooms; and a strong need for assessment practices in teacher education programs is required.

Creativity has been recognized as a critical skill for success in the 21st century. In today’s world, creativity is not just limited to artistic expression but is essential in problem-solving, innovation, and entrepreneurship. As a result, educators have been exploring ways to promote creativity in their students (Scott-Barrett et al., 2023). Teachers play a crucial role in promoting creativity in their students. They are responsible for creating an environment that fosters creativity and providing opportunities for students to develop their creative skills (Hill, 1992; Kozbelt et al., 2010). However, if teachers lack an understanding of creativity, they may not be successful in fostering it. Therefore, it is important to explore teachers' beliefs and practices regarding creativity to better understand the challenges and opportunities they face in promoting creativity in their students. Assessing creativity is a challenging task as it is a complex concept that cannot be easily defined or quantified (Runco, 2014). Creativity involves producing something new or original that has value. It is not just limited to the arts but can be seen in various fields, including science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In this study, we aim to investigate the beliefs and practices of experienced and novice English language teachers regarding assessing creativity in their students' writing skills.

In this study, we aimed to investigate the beliefs and practices of experienced and novice English language teachers regarding assessing creativity in their students' writing skills. We used a qualitative research method. To that end, a descriptive narrative design was employed, and autobiographical narratives of ten English language teachers (4 experienced and 6 novice) were collected and analyzed. We analyzed the autobiographical narratives through deductive-inductive thematic analysis. Moreover, we addressed the credibility, transferability, and dependability of the study.

The findings showed that experienced and novice teachers had different beliefs about assessing creativity in their students' writing skills. Experienced teachers believed that assessing creativity is important and identified elaboration, fluency, flexibility, and originality as crucial elements. However, their performance did not align with their beliefs. They did not provide enough opportunities for their students to develop their creative skills and did not use creative methods in their classrooms. On the other hand, novice teachers also believed that creativity should be taken into account, with elaboration being the most important element. However, their performance did not match their beliefs. They did not have enough knowledge or experience in promoting creativity in their students.

The lack of alignment between teachers' beliefs and practices suggests that there is a need for more education and training in the field of creativity education. Teachers who are familiar with creativity principles and have gained experience in this field are more likely to use creative methods in their classrooms (Scott, 2015). By providing teachers with the necessary knowledge and skills, we can create an environment that fosters creativity and helps students develop their creative skills. We conclude that there is a need for more education and training in the field of creativity education. By providing teachers with the necessary knowledge and skills, we can create an environment that fosters creativity and helps students develop their creative skills. Therefore, the educational system should familiarize teachers with the concept of creativity, the general methods of assessing it and the techniques for applying creativity, especially during teacher training courses and in-service programs.