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چکیده
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Language teachers' pedagogical practices and decisions are thought to be affected by their beliefs on language learning and teaching. This study aimed at exploring the vocabulary teaching and learning beliefs held by Iranian EFL teachers. To this end, the Likert-scale Vocabulary Teaching and Learning Belief Questionnaire (developed and validated by Gao and Ma, 2011) was completed by 204 Iranian EFL teachers. The results of Friedman’s analysis of variance combined with the content analysis of the interview conducted with 30 of the participants indicated that Iranian EFL teachers tended to value contextual word learning significantly higher than the other three sub-categories, namely list learning, repetition, and fixed meaning respectively. Moreover, the results of Mann- Whitney U test also revealed that there was a statistically significant difference between experienced and novice teachers in terms of their vocabulary learning and teaching beliefs. That is, experienced teachers attached significantly higher importance to contextual vocabulary learning, while novice teachers had more tendencies towards learning vocabulary by repetition. Furthermore, the results of chi-square analysis revealed that there were statistically significant differences between novice and experienced teachers' specific beliefs in both presentation and practice while teaching vocabulary. These discrepancies between experienced and novice teachers' beliefs in terms of vocabulary teaching and learning can help to explain the role of social and pedagogical experiences in shaping teachers beliefs which deserve teacher educators to concentrate on. The results are discussed in more details in the paper.
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