Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• Hossein Sabouri ¹
• Mina Mahboubi ²

¹ Associate Professor of English Language and Literature Department, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran

² MA in English Literature, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran

Abstract

This study investigates into teachers’ perceptions in order to find out whether they are thinking beyond the concept of method. Specifically speaking, the underlying goal is to diagnose whether teachers are context sensitive and are aware of the uniqueness of each specific teaching-learning context, that is, whether they are able to differentiate between the different requirements of one teaching context from another. Instead of exploring teachers’ views on the term’s method, postmethod, which is a dominant pattern in the literature of postmethod studies, teachers’ perceptions of postmethod teaching strategies (Stern, 1992) were explored across two proficiency levels of elementary and intermediate as a kind of contextual variable. To this end, a questionnaire tapped into three teachers’ perceived effectiveness of each of the two distinctive strategies of each dimension across two levels of intermediate and elementary. The statistical analysis didn’t reveal any significant difference in teachers’ perceptions across the two proficiency levels. This indicated that teachers didn’t consider the requirements of context but rather they adhered to just one method at both levels. Therefore, these teachers were not thinking beyond the framework of the method concept and were not oriented toward postmethod pedagogy in their thoughts.

Keywords

• intralingual- crosslingual dimension
• analytic-experiential dimension
• explicit- implicit dimension
• COLT strategies

Main Subjects

• philosophy