An Investigation into the Role of Iranian EFL Teachers' Critical Pedagogical Views in Their Educational Success

Critical pedagogy (CP) brings a new sociopolitical concept of linguistics and language teaching that is beginning to influence the teaching of English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). Having this in mind and in line with previous studies done on this field, the present study investigated the possible relationship between EFL teachers' critical pedagogical views and their professional success evaluated by students. In so doing, the Farsi version of Yilmaz Critical Pedagogy questionnaire was used to obtain the measures of the critical pedagogical views of 76 Iranian EFL teachers (Yilmaz 2009). Additionally students were to estimate teachers' professional success through the Successful Iranian EFL Teacher Questionnaire (SIETQ) (Pishghadam&Moafian, 2009). A statistically significant relationship between the two sets of measures was demonstrated through the Pearson product-moment correlation analysis (r = 0.6, p< 0.05). In addition by scrutinizing the details it was concluded that two of the three aspects of critical pedagogy sub-dimensions as defined by Yilmaz (2009) namely 'function of schools' and 'emancipator school', are significantly positively correlated with SIET scores using the multiple regression analysis. Implications of the study are further discussed. Index Terms--critical pedagogy, teacher success, teaching enhancement, partial correlation, political education