Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research
Volume:9 Issue: 3, Oct 2021

Seven articles in this issue address teachers’ beliefs and experiences with on-line professional development, the affordances offered by self-directed PD, the interactional processes that take place during on-line discussion groups, the changes in professional knowledge that group interaction can facilitate, the role of teacher reflection, the delivery of a course in on-line format, and challenges teachers face in switching to in-line instruction.

Professional development (PD) has received a growing attention in teacher education research since it has the potential to affect teacher learning. More recently and in particular as an aftermath of COVID-19 pandemic, online PD modes have overtaken more traditional face to face approaches. Despite this, studies on language teachers' preferences for online PD approaches have been limited. To bridge this gap, this study investigated Iranian English as Foreign Language (EFL) teachers' perceptions of online PD. Participants included 105 male and female EFL instructors teaching at private institutes, universities, and public schools. An online questionnaire consisting of closed- and open-ended items was employed to discover teachers' perspectives on PD. The findings indicated that despite having little or no online PD experiences, most teachers had a positive perception towards an electronic mode of professional learning and rated expert teacher applications, online video lesson study, and video library as their favourite online resources. The study recommends taking advantage of various online PD formats in teacher education programs, esp. at a time when most teaching and learning continues to be online worldwide.

This case study investigates how teachers render digital professional development in digital environments by interviewing with three preparatory school English language teachers voluntarily engaged in online professional development.  In order to examine their process of teacher learning in online settings, we drew on Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2012) regarding the motivation as to how they engage and learn in the course of online professional development. An exploratory approach was adopted based on the interviews, and the motivational factors of the participants together with how they exploit technology were presented in three different cases. The study revealed that all the teachers were intrinsically motivated, and the need for developing competence, exercising autonomy, and assessing relatedness were key motivational reasons behind their online professional learning. Instagram, MOOCs, YouTube and websites were the online sources mentioned by the participants when they turn to the Internet for help. The discussion focuses on implications of this study for encouraging language teachers to engage in online professional development drawing on self-determination theory.

Sociocultural perspectives of learning emphasise the role of social interaction and activity in the process of knowledge construction and foreground the social-cultural settings in which knowledge construction occurs. This paper examines how in-service language teachers co-construct technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) in asynchronous discussion and explores two significant areas: 1) the critical elements of TPACK and 2) the process and strategies of knowledge construction. As such, the focus of the paper is placed on the type of knowledge that is considered significant by language teachers and the process of knowledge construction, with attention to the communicative strategies and resources. Online chats from 13 teachers are analysed using both thematic and sociocultural discourse analysis. The results indicate that TPACK mainly concerns the affordances of technology and methods to integrate technology from teachers’ perspectives. In the process of co-constructing TPACK, teachers use different communicative strategies to negotiate meaning and achieve mutual understanding. Various contextual resources are exploited to facilitate and mediate the process of knowledge construction. This paper highlights the significance of context in developing knowledge, the need for providing participants with training for communicative strategies, establishing ground rules in collaborative work, giving ownership of task or topic to the participants and the importance of social talk.

Although studying teachers’ online interactions has gained momentum in recent years, little is known about interactional development in online communities. The present study addressed this gap by exploring discursive change in second language teachers’ interactions in an online professional development (PD) course structured around mobile phone usage. To this aim, the microgenetic analysis approach of sociocultural theory was adopted to track developments in teachers’ interactions based on Goodall’s (2000) skilled conversation threads. Data analysis revealed 152 skilled conversation exchanges in the online PD. Three themes were dominant among these exchanges and constituted most of the interactions: (1) Direct and indirect uses of mobile phones, (2) challenges and benefits of using mobile phones, and (3) teaching different language skills using mobile phones. Detailed analysis of the exchanges revealed that the teachers gradually changed in their perceptions about using mobile phones as well as the discourse they employed to represent their understandings. The findings are discussed in relation to teacher educators’ role in facilitating online PD and the importance of developing a knowledge base that accounts for teachers’ online membership.

Amid the recent overwhelming demand for online education as emergency remote teaching, this study aims to contribute to a better understanding of online teaching and learning experiences. Through a self-study of online teaching, it explores a teacher educator’s emotional experiences and struggles during online teaching concerning teacher identity, pedagogy, and student participation. The study includes both the teacher educator’s reflection on her own emotional experiences and her students’ end-of-the-semester reflections on their online participation, providing multiple perspectives on a variety of online pedagogical tools. Her self-reflection on online teaching deepened her understanding of the role of emotions in her teaching. Additionally, her discovery of students’ perspectives on their (non)participation and subsequent reflection brought new insight and understanding of student experiences, reducing her own teaching anxiety and self-doubt in the negotiation of teacher identity online. Results of the study suggest that both the teacher’s and students’ emotional experiences are significant resources for pedagogical development via critical reflection, suggesting that the scope of teacher reflection should be expanded to include self-reflective work on emotions for teachers’ own personal growth and professional development.

It has been argued that successful professional development efforts, especially in assessment-literacy, need to address emotional components and the existence of implicit conceptions in order to raise consciousness and ultimately transform practice (Xu and Brown, 2016: p. 156).   Experiential approaches have been shown to be highly effective for adult learning, especially in bringing about and sustaining changes in beliefs and practices. In this paper, I explore the use of an experiential approach in an online language assessment course, describing in depth two formative assessment (FA) activities and the technology tools that were employed. These activities served to (1) develop participants’ AL in formative assessment, including online formative assessment; (2) evoke emotions, raise consciousness about conceptions, and prompt a desire for transformation; and (3) bridge the theory-practice gap. This paper offers insights into approaches to FA and teacher development in online settings and seeks to contribute to the growing body of knowledge in the field of assessment education.

Language teaching is noted to be a stressful profession at the best of times, but in 2020 it became even more difficult for all teachers because of the spread of COVID-19 pandemic worldwide. Teachers were required to switch suddenly to deliver their lessons on online platforms, with many having little or no prior training. This has certainly been the case for language teachers, language students and language schools because most language courses, initially designed for face-to-face instruction, were suddenly ‘forced’ to move to online platforms. This sudden move meant that language schools, language teachers and their students needed to adapt fast to a new virtual world that for many was an unknown teaching world. For language teachers the main challenge was how to adapt their courses and lessons to make them suitable for this new online delivery mode. This paper reports on the reflections of the adaptation challenges of four English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers at a prominent English language institution in Costa Rica, Central America, as they suddenly had to shift to online lesson delivery due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

During my doctoral viva voce, my external examiner, Professor Phil Benson, asked if I could clarify my admittedly nebulous application of the term “learning environment,” and the ambiguously synonymous usage of others like “setting,” “context”, “atmosphere”, “learning space(s)”, and “classroom.” To simplify this entanglement for the purpose of passing my oral examination, I asserted that I just meant “classroom.” However, in the months that followed, I reflected more deeply on this question. I first began to think about language itself as being a type of “environment” with its own inextricable qualities of space and structure, and with language use (spoken and written) giving breath to these dimensional attributes. As this metaphor seemed decidedly structuralist, I turned my attention to what I felt was a more interesting extrapolation of a spatial theme embedded in the concept of environments: the complex interactions in specific spaces and how such interactions relate to learning. It is on this first point (the spatial aspects of language) that Benson’s book begins and on the second (language learning environments) that it concludes.

Acknowledging the central role language teachers play in the assessment process, viewed as both consumers of testing information and independent assessors, the newly-emergent field of Language Assessment Literacy (LAL) has generally been viewed ‘as a useful knowledge base that incorporates unique aspects inherent in theorizing and assessing language-related performance’ (Inbar-Lourie, 2017, p. 259). This edited volume seeks to further unfold the multifarious concept of LAL in both theoretical and pedagogical terms in an effort to elucidate key issues in the area, enrich current knowledge related to the use of proper assessment practices and procedures in the foreign language (FL) classroom and highlight useful avenues for future research. To this end, the book is organized into four parts with Part 1 addressing predominantly theoretical aspects of language assessment literacy in four separate chapters while subsequent Parts 2, 3 and 4 with three chapters each are strictly devoted to descriptions of specific assessment processes enhancing LAL within a variety of FL contexts worldwide. All contributions are accompanied by lists of useful bibliographical references on the topic while supplementary material related to research design, instruments and methods also appear in appendices at the end of several chapters.