Abstract
The ultimate goal of this paper is to investigate the pedagogical views and attitudes of Moroccan high school teachers towards Method-based pedagogy. It attempts to investigate the extent to which teachers are satisfied with and committed to conventional methods. Also, the paper aims at investigating the alternative practices teachers are more likely to resort to in order to compensate for the limitations of conventional methods. In addition to this, a further objective of this study is to investigate the extent to which pre-service teacher training programs in Morocco are aware of the challenges of the post-method era. This is measured through their awareness of the requirements of the post-method era and the extent to which teacher trainers concern themselves with equipping the prospective teachers with the necessary skills to be reflective researchers and responsibly eclectic teachers. In this respect, the data collection instruments opted for in the present study ranged from quantitative to qualitative in nature. The findings reveal that the vast majority of Moroccan high school teachers (P=78%) are dissatisfied with conventional methods and - (P=96%) of them- are not committed to one or two teaching methods. The vast majority report that they resort to an eclectic approach to language teaching due to the impracticality and inflexibility of the established methods. Most teachers (P=80%) admit that they use a random eclecticism as they rely mainly on their intuitive rather than principled judgments. In this regard, interviews with teacher trainers and supervisors also reveal that pre-service teacher training programs in Morocco limit themselves only to training the prospective teachers to use methods and approaches without training them to be responsibly eclectic. The findings also show that the majority of teachers do, to some extent, know about classroom research; however, they - (P=72%) of them- have never conducted it inside their classrooms. The teachers (P=57%) attribute this to the lack of financial support and to the fact that they are not well-trained to conduct research inside their classrooms. Finally, the results of this study imply many suggestions of which we mention: the introduction of a post-method pedagogy in the Moroccan pre-service teacher training programs, equipping teachers with the methodological tools necessary as well as supporting them financially to conduct classroom-research for the purpose of constructing teaching methodologies that suit the needs to the very specific students and contexts within which they work.
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