Novice EFL Teachers’ Preconceptions of Teaching English: A Case Study of Iranian Private Institutes

As a growing trend in the cognitive approach to teaching, exploring teachers’ preconceptions can help to reveal various underlying dimen-sions that could leave significant impacts on the teaching process. Such preconceptions, of course, are very important in the case of novice teach-ers, particularly English as foreign language (EFL) ones, who have started to shape or re-shape their ideas about teaching. This study investigated Iranian EFL novice teachers’ preconceptions at private institutes, follow-ing three purposes: (a) it tried to find any possibly existing underlying preconceptions about teaching in the teachers; (b) it sought to detect any similar patterns in their ideas; and (c) it intended to find the metaphori-cal expressions the teachers used to share their experiences of teaching English. To trace any similarities in the novice teachers preconceptions, copies of a questionnaire including twelve items were completed by a sample of novice EFL teachers (43 males/females). The data analysis revealed five factors underlying the preconceptions: learning, students problem solving, teachers role, instruction, and good teacher. Moreover, to investigate the metaphorical expressions, 20-miniute semi-structured interviews were arranged with five EFL novice teachers. The interviews revealed that the participants employed metaphors in sharing their teaching-related experiences.