Exploring Teachers’ and Learners’ Attitude towards Homework: The case of English versus Non-English-Major Teachers’ Homework Practices

Abstract

Homework assignments provide a channel of communication between students and teachers especially in an EFL context where there is little exposure to English language out of the classroom context. Thus, exploring attitudes and homework features may provide teachers with useful information to know how to plan their homework assignments to improve students’ learning opportunities. This study aimed to explore both teachers’ and learners’ attitude towards homework; the difficulties faced by both teachers and learners with regard to homework as well as the assignment characteristics of English-major versus Non-English-major teachers. The study participants were 120 randomly selected adult male and female EFL learners and 81 EFL teachers. The data were collected through questionnaires and subsequent semi-structured interviews. SPSS 24 software was used to analyze the questionnaire data and interviews were recorded, transcribed, coded and categorized for further analysis. The results indicated that students had positive attitudes towards homework assignments. There was no significant difference between students’ attitude towards homework given by English Major (EM) and Non-English Major (NEM) teachers. The data showed that teachers do feel that homework is essential to students’ language development. Similarly, there was no significant difference among EM versus NEM teachers in their attitudes toward homework. The results revealed the following reasons for the difficulties that teachers and learners faced in assigning/doing homework assignments respectively. Those reasons varied from not learning the required concept, not knowing the instruction, not enjoying homework, not paying attention when homework assignments were presented, not understanding homework instruction, copying homework or cheating, the absence of related and meaningful tasks, parents’ lack of knowledge, lack of word power and grammar, to anxiety and stress of homework. The findings illustrated that there were some differences between EM and NEM teachers in terms of amount, skill area used, and degree of individualization in their homework assignments. The results of this study offer a number of pedagogical implications for teachers, curriculum developers, and institute managers.