EFL University Instructors’ Employment Status and Their Perception of Professional Commitment

Abstract

Instructors play an important role in educating the future members of society through their work in universities and quality education cannot be achieved without the supreme efforts of dedicated and committed university teachers. Hence, there is a call for more research concerning the notion of teacher commitment, its dimensions and the factors that influence it. The current study first aimed to set priority among the dimensions of EFL instructors' professional commitment through Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling and then investigate the effect of EFL instructors' employment status as full time or part time on their professional commitment through two-tailed <em>t</em>-test. A previously validated EFL Teachers' Professional Commitment Questionnaire was employed to collect data from 420 EFL male and female university instructors. The results exhibited a significant difference between these two variables in total. One of the important implications of this research is that EFL instructors inspire to evaluate their commitment regarding the priority of dimensions and their underlying components meticulously to find out what they should work on more to improve students' achievements in the EFL learning context of Iran.