ELT educational context, teacher intuition and learner hidden agenda (a study of conflicting maxims)

This study, first, attempted to explore the conflict or tension between EFL teacher intuition or concepts and the conception with a composite view assembled from learner's accounts of the distinctive features of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), and second to investigate the latter's "hidden agenda" (Nunan, 1998) of what ELT should be. On the other hand, role of educational context as an independent variable in determining such conflicting conceptions was also investigated. The study was carried out in the Iranian educational context conventionally categorized into three settings including; authoritarian, semi-democratic and democratic, given their varying existing educational policies and planning. Both the learner and teacher-participants (N=150, 45, respectively) answered three triangulating and already validated questionnaires (Brindly, 1984 and BALLI of Horwitz, 1987) attempting both the nature of language learning activities and their beliefs on CLT. Findings revealed that the learners hold variety of self-efficacy beliefs different from those of their teachers about learning language, many of which supported to be attributed to the educational context type and language planning and the pertinent administration policies. While both sides agreed in general on the virtues of CLT to language teaching, there were interesting differences in their perceptions mainly as to lesson purposes, classroom activities, and learning outcomes. The implications of the study would revolve around the (I) dependency of reflective teaching and learning on teacher's awareness of learner's needs, capabilities, potentials and preferences or in Richard's (1996) term of learners" maxims", (II) necessity of teacher-learner cooperation in syllabus design, (III) significance of narrowing the gap between their maxims of instruction and learning, and (IV) awareness of the possible imposition of negative impacts like tension, anxiety and dissatisfaction on the learner's side resulting from any cognitive and intuitive mismatch on the teacher's side.