An Investigation of EFL Novice and Experienced Teachers‟ Classroom Management Strategies and Teaching Styles

Abstract

Learning English as an international language plays a pivotal role in current educational system of Iran. Classroom management strategies and teaching styles in English classes are of the most challenging aspects of teaching for novice and sometimes experienced teachers. The current study was designed to investigate classroom management strategies that Iranian teachers use and the dominant teaching style applied in the classroom. To study the research questions, 60 teachers in 10 language centers were surveyed. Teachers were at different levels of experience ranging from 3 years of teaching to 19 years of teaching and consisted of both male and female instructors. They were teaching English at different levels. To gather data, Lowman‟s (1995) Two-Dimensional Teaching Style Scale and the Behavior and Martin and Sass‟s (2010) Instructional Management Scale (BIMS) were carried out during two sessions in several private language institutes in Shiraz. The results of the frequency analysis and Spearman correlations indicated that the dominant teaching style of the novice EFL teachers was the intellectual excitement while for experienced teachers the dominant style was the interpersonal rapport. In addition, the results of the correlation analyses showed that there was not an overall relationship between the teaching style of the teachers and their classroom management strategies for neither the novice nor the experienced teachers. However, there was a significant correlation between the intellectual excitement type of teaching style and instructional type of the classroom management strategies. This was true for both the novice and the experienced EFL teachers