commitment to university

Universities require highly qualified and committed instructors to carry out the significant tasks of educating the future generation of the society. The primary interest of this study was to explore the construct of teacher commitment to determine its dimensions and components and finally design EFL Teachers’ Professional Commitment Questionnaire. First, through a thorough analysis of the available literature as well as a semi-structured interview, the core dimensions and components were opted. Then, in the second qualitative phase, the researcher designed the early draft of a structured questionnaire which was handed in to 25 experts. Content Validity Ratio was computed to ensure validity. Subsequently, the modified draft of the EFL Teachers’ Professional Commitment Questionnaire was designed and administered to 70 EFL university instructors to investigate the validity and reliability of the instrument employing Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling.  As a result, three dimensions of Commitment to Students, Commitment to Profession, and Commitment to University along with 10 components were confirmed. The practical implication of this study is a validated EFL Teachers’ Professional Commitment Questionnaire performing as an evaluative tool to assess the level of teachers’ commitment with respect to their commitment to students, university, and profession in the EFL academic context of Iran.

Instructors play an important role in educating the future members of society through their work in universities and quality education cannot be achieved without the supreme efforts of dedicated and committed university teachers. Hence, there is a call for more research concerning the notion of teacher commitment, its dimensions and the factors that influence it. The current study first aimed to set priority among the dimensions of EFL instructors’ professional commitment through Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling and then investigate the effect of EFL instructors’ employment status as full time or part time on their professional commitment through two-tailed t-test. A previously validated EFL Teachers’ Professional Commitment Questionnaire was employed to collect data from 420 EFL male and female university instructors. The results exhibited a significant difference between these two variables in total. One of the important implications of this research is that EFL instructors inspire to evaluate their commitment regarding the priority of dimensions and their underlying components meticulously to find out what they should work on more to improve students’ achievements in the EFL learning context of Iran.