A Socio-Cultural Study of Language Teacher Status

Abstract

The present study pursued two goals: First, to discover the subscales underlying the teacher Status Scale (TSS); and second, to reveal the status of the teachers of Persian, Arabic, and English in Iranian junior high school students' perceptions in order to determine the relative roles of national, religious, and western influences in the identity construction of the students. The data was collected from 650 junior high school students, who rated their 80 teachers. Regarding the first goal, an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was employed revealing three subscales of the TSS: personal status, social status, and educational status. As for the second goal, a number of Chi-square tests were run on the data. Based on the results, English teachers were found to have the highest status in all the three factors and as a whole, denoting the more dominant role of western influence in the construction of the students' identities.