Comparative Evaluation of Dialogic versus Monologic Pedagogy among EFL Instructors and Teacher Educators in Iran

The present study attempted to investigate how language teacher educators evaluated two current approaches: monologic or prevalent pedagogy which is widely practiced all across the world including Iran, and dialogic pedagogy which is theoretically established by Yakubinsky, Bakhtin, and Vygotsky. The study tried to understand, whether Iranian EFL teachers and teacher educators preferred to adopt a monologic or dialogic approach and what they assumed to be the obstacles of their employment and its attributed features. To do so, through convenience and random sampling, the researcher administered a questionnaire consisting of 30 Likert-scale items among 150 EFL teachers and practitioners in order to explore whether they (tended to practice) practiced either dialogic or monologic teaching. Then, the researcher interviewed around seven percent of the interviewees, i.e.10 of them, who were EFL teacher educators in Iranian pedagogic setting. Through both quantitative analysis of the questionnaire and qualitative analysis of the interview, it was found that most EFL teachers and teacher instructors had an ultimate inclination to practice dialogic teaching, though in reality may not. This process highlighted some interesting reflections that made it possible for the researcher to explore language teachers' and teacher educators' acquaintance, conceptualization and (re)orientation about monologism and dialogism. The analysis of the collected data indicated that what is common in Iranian EFL contexts is completely agreeable with monologic practice. Despite the fact that for more than a century, the credibility and effectiveness of monologic approach has been criticized, primarily in Russia and later all across the globe, Iranian curriculum developers, EFL teacher educators and, consequently, English teachers had not adequately been able to move along with the new engagement-oriented, autonomy-fostering, emergence-welcoming, affordance-facilitating, agency-dominated and synergistic ecology of dialogic pedagogy.