Reflective Teaching through Journal Writing: A Study on EFL Teachers’ Reflection- For-, In, and On-Action

Currently reflective teaching has received much attention by educators in the field of education and is believed to be a serious new measure of the quality of teaching. Many experimental studies have been carried out to study teachers’ reflective teaching using methods and research instruments such as reflective journals, video recordings or actions research but little research has been conducted using reflective journals in L2 teaching in the context of Iran. The present study intends to explore the extent to which EFL teachers engage in reflective teaching. For the survey section, there was a random sampling of 250 Iranian EFL teachers holding M.A, B.A. Ph.D. degree in linguistics, translation, English literature. Out of 250 surveyed participants, a convenience sampling comprising of 60 EFL teachers, both males and females, from two language institutes in Sabzevar, Iran, participated in the study. They were randomly assigned into two groups of A as the experimental group and B as the control group with 30 participants each. Data were collected by the following means: (a) Akbari et al.’s (2010) reflective teaching inventory administered to 250 Iranian EFL teachers, (b) journals written by 60 EFL teachers. The results revealed that EFL teachers practice the metacognitive as the most frequently used component and the practical component as the least frequently used one. Using Farrell’s (2004) framework, journal data were analyzed whose results indicated that EFL teachers practiced three chronological types of reflection namely, reflection-for-,in, and on-action with different degrees. The analysis of the contents of reflective teaching resulted in a framework with metacognitive, learner-based, cognitive, critical components. Some implications and suggestions for teacher education programs are discussed in EFL context.