No abstract

This study investigates the practices of public (high) school, private language institute, and public-private teachers. In particular, it aims at addressing the role of contextual factors, the variations teachers introduce to cope with them, and the degree of sustainable behaviour among these three groups of teachers. High school teachers consisted of those who taught only in high schools and the ones teaching both in high schools and private language institutes. For this purpose, classroom practices of 60 EFL teachers (N=20 per group) with 3 to 6 years of teaching experience and BA degree in TEF) were compared in terms of group/pair work, teacher talking time, L1 use, questioning, corrective feedback, and coverage of language skills. The findings of the study indicate that a significant difference exists among these three groups of teachers in terms of their practices. It is noteworthy that in the same teaching context of high school, the practices of teachers with and without private language teaching experience are significantly dissimilar except in the duration of pair/group work activities and the rates of repetition and explicit correction. This study suggests that high school EFL teachers with teaching experience in private language institutes subscribe more closely to the tenets of communicative language teaching and thus can act as powerful agents of sustainable language teaching in Iranian public schools.

The present study aims at investigating the role of context of learning in language learning strategy use among Iranian EFL learners. To conduct the study, 224 learners were chosen at the contexts of pre-university, private school, and university. Using Oxford's Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), the researchers investigated EFL learning strategy use among the participants of the study. The results showed that there was a significant difference in using cognitive, metacognitive, affective, social strategies and overall use of learning strategies among learners in these contexts and also there was a significant relationship between gender and strategy use just in the context of private school. The results of the study showed that metacognitive strategies were favored most by learners in these three contexts and affective strategies were favored least in the contexts of pre-university and private school and memory strategies were favored least among university students.