An Investigation of Teachers’ Perceptions of KARDS in an EFL Context
Subject Areas :Vahid Hassani 1 , Mohammad Khatib 2 , Massood Yazdani Moghaddam 3
1 - Department of English, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran
2 - Department of English, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran
3 - Department of English, Faculty of Humanities, Garmsar Branch, Islamic Azad University, Garmsar, Iran
Keywords: KARDS, language teacher education, teachers&rsquo, perception,
Abstract :
Kumaravadivelue’s (2012) language teacher education for a global society known as KARDS has gathered little momentum in the context of Iran due to scarcity of studies on it. To fill this gap, the present research investigated Iranian EFL teachers’ perceptions of KARDS with regard to variables including teaching context, gender, and teaching experience. To this end, a KARDS questionnaire was designed, constructed, and validated by the researchers, and the results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirmed the validity of the questionnaire. Later, it was administered to 400 English teachers in Tehran. Then, 20 participants volunteered for follow-up interviews, and their verbatim interview transcripts were content analyzed. The results of descriptive statistics and MANOVA indicated that teachers’ perceptions were positive for the majority of items except theorization, observation of colleagues’ classes, and needs analysis done by outsiders, and there were significant differences in teachers’ perceptions of KARDS with regard to their teaching context, gender, and teaching experience. Also, the qualitative investigation of teachers’ perceptions confirmed the findings of the quantitative part.