Iranian EFL Teachers’ Productive and Receptive Metalinguistic Knowledge as a Function of Their Academic Major

Abstract

The rise of attention in language pedagogy towards subject matter knowledge and its impact on teachers' professionalism accentuates the role of language teachers' metalinguistic knowledge in L2 teaching. The present study focused on identifying the status of Iranian EFL teachers' metalinguistic knowledge concerning their academic major. For this aim, a metalinguistic knowledge test entailing 2 modules of production and reception was administered to a total of 200 Iranian EFL teachers. To cross-validate the metalinguistic test results, a series of semi-structured interviews were conducted with 40 of the target EFL teachers to explore their perspectives about the academic major and metalinguistic knowledge development. Based on the MANOVA results, the academic major was found to be a predictor for the productive and receptive mode of metalinguistic knowledge attained by the teachers. The interview results boring out those of the metalinguistic knowledge test revealed more facts about the teachers' perspectives of different factors contributing to their metalinguistic knowledge development. The teachers complained about the deficiency that existed in their university curriculum which lacked enough courses referring to metalinguistic knowledge and provided some suggestions in this regard. The findings offer a number of pedagogical implications for language teachers and teacher educators and state some recommendations for further research directions.