Saman Soleymani; Ghafour Rezaie Golandouz; Parviz Maftoon
Abstract
Although Sociocultural Theory (SCT) was introduced to English Language Teaching (ELT) almost three decades ago, it has not yet started to find its way into the epistemological and practical ...
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Although Sociocultural Theory (SCT) was introduced to English Language Teaching (ELT) almost three decades ago, it has not yet started to find its way into the epistemological and practical aspects of English Language Teacher Education (LTE) programs in Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) language institutions context. Not having met the needs of English teachers, teacher educators, and academic and non-academic teaching programs and feeling a pressing need for innovative approaches in language teacher education, time is ripe for LTE programs to present a curriculum that is globally-driven and locally appropriate. To this end, this paper aimed to develop a sociocultural language teacher education (SLTE) curriculum model as an alternative to the LTE programs in the Iranian EFL context. The researchers applied Vygotskian principles and extensions of SCT pedagogy to construct a curriculum model that draws on Graves’ framework of LTE curriculum design and Richards’ model of teacher education that collectively incorporate different aspects, namely context analysis, needs analysis, approach, content, process, teacher educator’s roles, student teachers’ roles, and program evaluation. To present an innovative LTE program, the researchers extracted and put together the tenets, extensions, and categories of SCT comprehensively and presented them through a complementary curriculum model that is a combination of Graves’ framework and Richards’ model of teacher education. This tentative but dynamic curriculum model might help teachers, teacher educators, policy makers, and other stakeholders to reconceptualize and restructure their mentalities and use the findings when designing small-scale and large-scale LTE programs.
