Investigating the Reasons behind EFL University Teachers’ Use of the Language Avoidance Strategy

Abstract

In the context of teaching English as a foreign language, teachers, though primarily competent and equipped with varying levels of knowledge, abilities, and skills, resort to language avoidance for one reason or another. Language avoidance is a communication strategy that foreign language teacher and/or learners use when encountering a communicative problem or difficulty managing communication and imparting information to the required level. It forms an integral part of everyday communication at large and in foreign language classes in particular. The current paper aims at investigating the reasons behind English as a foreign language teachers’ use of language avoidance. To bring about this aim, it is hypothesized that different personal, educational, and social reasons play a role in teachers’ language avoidance. To validate the preceding hypothesis, a sample of 39 university teachers of English were interviewed and given a questionnaire to state their responses concerning the role of the factors mentioned above in their use of language avoidance. It has been found out that language avoidance by university teachers of English as a foreign language is differently impacted by the personal, educational, and social factors under study.