The Contribution of Gender and Teaching Experience to Iranian EFL Teachers’ Perceptions of Critical Pedagogy

Abstract

This study aimed at investigating the Iranian EFL teachers’ perceptions of critical pedagogy values in teaching English with an emphasis on gender and teaching experience. For that end, a 33-item Likert-type questionnaire was developed. The researcher-made instrument was administered to 102 EFL teachers teaching English in language schools in Qom, Iran. The internal consistency of the instrument was calculated through using Cronbach Alpha. It showed a high reliability (α=.88). The data was subjected to non-parametric Mann Whitney U test to check any potential significant difference between the levels of CP perceptions in the male and female EFL teachers. The results revealed that there was not a significant difference between genders in all items except item1 (p=.021), item18 (p=.017), item19 (p=.008), item 20 (p=.004), item28 (p=.000) and item 31 (p=.03) since the p value for these items was less than .05 (Pallant, 2005). The Kruskal Wallis test was also run to investigate if there were any differences in CP perceptions across four levels of language teaching experience. The test statistics revealed no statistically significant difference in levels of CP perception across four groups of EFL teachers in all items except item 18 (p=.034), 19(p=.025), 31(p=.01) and 32(p=.027) which were significant since the p value for them was less than .05 (Pallant, 2005). Then, the results of the study are discussed and some implications are presented.

Keywords

• Critical Pedagogy
• Critical Applied Linguistics
• Critical Literacy
• Teaching Experience