Jordanian Teachers' Attitudes toward Foreign Language Teaching and their Relationship to these Teachers' Classroom Practices

Abstract

This study aimed at exploring Jordanian public school teachers’ attitudes toward teaching English as a foreign language and the factors that may influence these attitudes. It also aimed at investigating the relationship between their attitudes toward the English language and their classroom practices. The participants of the study were twenty female teachers of the English language. They were purposefully chosen from the schools in Ajloun Directorate of Education in the second semester of the academic year 2012/2013. To answer the questions of the study, the researcher designed a questionnaire, and adopted an observation checklist. Proper statistical analyses were used to analyze the results. The results of the study showed that the EFL teachers' attitudes toward teaching English as a foreign language were moderate. The results also showed that teachers' actual pedagogical competences were moderate with a mean of 2.736. The correlation coefficient between the teachers' attitudes and their actual pedagogical competences was negative and low.

Key Words: Attitudes, pedagogical competence, classroom practices.