On the Effects of Doing CDA Term Projects on Iranian Graduate TEFL Students’ Critical Pedagogic Attitudes

Abstract

The expansion of the scope of TESOL to include the social, political, and ideological aspects of the learners’ lives, has necessitated  a more systematic  application  of  the  principles  of  critical  pedagogy  to  the  field  of  ELT. Despite this, few attempts have been made in this regard. Having felt the need, the present researchers embarked on examining the effectiveness of assigning critical discourse analysis term projects to graduate students of TEFL as one of the many possible ways to promote the critical pedagogic attitudes of the prospective teachers of English as a foreign language. To this end, forty three homogenous male and female graduate students of TEFL studying at the Islamic Azad University, Mazandaran Science and Research Branch, took a five-point Likert-scale critical attitude questionnaire to show the level of their critical pedagogic attitudes. Then, the students in the experimental group were guided to choose Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) topics for their term projects while the rest of the students who constituted the control group were guided to choose NCDA topics. In the third phase of the study, the subjects were given the same attitude questionnaire as the post-test in order to determine whether the subjects’ critical attitudes had changed as a result of doing their term-projects. The results showed that doing critical pedagogy–related term projects had a significant influence on the critical pedagogic attitudes of the graduate students of TEFL. The implications of this finding are discussed in the present paper.