Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to examine the effectiveness of language teacher education programs in Iran. To this end, we evaluated 18 pre-service language teacher education programs following Kiely’s (The Routledge handbook of English language teacher education. Routledge, 2019) framework. Informed by this framework, we focused on what, when, who, and how in evaluating teacher education programs. The syllabi of these programs were analyzed at the end of each program externally by the researchers. Moreover, we conducted a document analysis on the content of the syllabi based on Freeman’s (Language Teaching Research, 24(1):5–16, 2020) model of the knowledge base of language teacher education programs. In this model, the knowledge base includes content, teaching force, learners, pedagogy, and teacher education. The findings revealed that language teacher education programs in Iran focus more on the pedagogy dimension and largely ignore the other dimensions. These programs emphasize traditional theoretical issues rather than attending to teacher professional development, and therefore, are not very effective.
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Tajeddin, Z., Tavassoli, K. (2023). Effective Language Teacher Education. In: Tajeddin, Z., Griffiths, C. (eds) Language Education Programs. Language Policy, vol 34. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38754-8_4
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