Critical Pedagogy: EFL Teachers’ Views, Experience and Academic Degrees

Although critical pedagogy has brought about positive changes in the field of education by shifting from traditional pedagogy to emancipatory pedagogy, not much attention has been paid to the factors affecting teachers’ beliefs of critical pedagogy and only few studies have been conducted to design reliable and valid instruments to study EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teachers’ beliefs about different aspects of teaching in the field of critical pedagogy. Consequently, there is a gap in our knowledge of critical pedagogy in terms of Iranian EFL teachers’ beliefs about critical pedagogy and their tendency to implement it in teaching EFL. This study was conducted to help fill this gap, through developing a questionnaire and focusing on the relationship between teachers’ teaching experience and educational background, and their beliefs about critical pedagogy. To this end, a critical language pedagogy questionnaire was developed and validated, using factor analysis. The questionnaire was administered to 403 respondents. Pearson Correlation Coefficient and MANOVA were used to analyze the data. The result indicated that there were significant differences among the BA, MA and PhD participants’ awareness of critical pedagogy, with the PhD holders found to be the most aware of principles and practices of critical language pedagogy. Furthermore, teachers’ teaching experience had a significant relationship with their awareness of critical pedagogy with more experienced teachers scoring higher on the four factors in the questionnaire.