The role of collaborative inquiry in Iranian EFL teachers’ reflective teaching: the case of teaching experience

ABSTRACT

Teachers’ collaborative inquiry is a process of learning through which teams of teachers evaluate and analyze their teaching practice, and reflective practice contributes to teachers’ professionalism. The present descriptive survey study aimed to investigate the role of collaborative inquiry in Iranian EFL teachers’ reflective teaching and whether teaching experience (novice and experienced teachers) affects collaborative inquiry and reflective teaching. For this purpose, 185 Iranian female and male language institute EFL teachers were randomly selected and responded to the survey instruments. The data were collected by the Survey of Reflective Practice and Collaborative Inquiry Survey and were analyzed by multivariate analysis of variance and Pearson correlation. The findings demonstrated a significant positive correlation between pedagogical reflection and collaborative inquiry and a significant negative correlation between critical reflection and collaborative inquiry. Furthermore, novice teachers obtained higher scores in pedagogical reflection whilst their experienced counterparts were more critically reflective. The present study findings contribute to further uncovering the links between reflective teaching practices and collaborative inquiry of EFL teachers. Therefore, school principals can design collaborative learning experiences, especially for novice teachers, to foster reflection. Furthermore, teachers should regard collaboration as a self-growth opportunity and help their colleagues develop and improve their teaching practices.

KEYWORDS:

• EFL teachers
• novice
• experienced
• collaborative inquiry
• reflective practice
• critical reflection

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ekram Dehghani

Ekram Dehghani is currently a Ph.D. candidate of TEFL in the English Department, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Iran. She is doing her Ph.D. dissertation on Iranian English as foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ reflective teaching. Her research areas of interest are issues in second language acquisition (SLA) and reflective teaching.

Ehsan Rezvani

Ehsan Rezvani is an assistant professor of TEFL in the English Department, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Iran. His main research areas of interest are issues in second language acquisition (SLA) and computer-assisted language learning (CALL). Ehsan Rezvani has published several articles on language teaching and he has presented papers in international conferences.

Bahram Hadian

Bahram Hadian is an assistant professor of Linguistics in the English Department, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Iran. His main research areas of interest are general and applied linguistics as well as comparative linguistics. Bahram Hadian has published a number of articles on linguistics and language teaching. He can be contacted at [email protected].