Journal of Educational Sciences > Volume 8, No. 2, 1996

Ascertaining the Pedagogical Preferences of EFL Teachers in Saudi Arabia / Mohammed A. Zaid

Recent studies have shown that ESL/EFL teachers could develop personalized theories about the teaching and learning of English as a second/foreign language and that these theories manifest themselves in the actual language classroom processes. Consequently. a methodological gap may occur between what teachers are doing and what program administrators and writers of textbook guidelines expect the teachers to be doing. For this reason, EFL administrators should attempt to ascertain the pedagogical preferences of their teachers. This paper presents a self-monitoring evaluative tool which may help in gauging methodological proclivity. The paper reports the findings of an administration of this instrument to the seventeen EFL teachers of a department of English at a major university in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The results of this study show that the subjects' pedagogical preference is for Communicative Language Teaching; still these EFL teachers also advocated some support for the theoretical principles of two other methodologies: audio-lingual Teaching and Grammar-Translation Method.