The Importance Of Examining Teacher And Learners Attitudes And Understanding Learning Needs In The Twenty First Century

Abstract

An indispensable part of any curriculum design in an educational setting is the analysis of the needs of the learners involved in the context. The needs can be addressed from different perspectives. Among them, the learners' needs in terms of their perceptions toward what constitute learning/teaching and testing processes are of prominent values. If there is a match between how they view these processes and what the course designers assume them to be, more achievement is likely to happen. In this regard, no one-to-one correspondence exists between what the learners think and what really should be; however, any modifications made to set the ideas closer to one another are of great value.

An indispensable part of any curriculum design in an educational setting is the analysis of the needs of the learners involved in the context. The needs can be addressed from different perspectives. Among them, the learners' needs in terms of their perceptions toward what constitute learning/teaching and testing processes are of prominent values. If there is a match between how they view these processes and what the course designers assume them to be, more achievement is likely to happen. In this regard, no one-to-one correspondence exists between what the learners think and what really should be; however, any modifications made to set the ideas closer to one another are of great value.

In this study, an attempt is made to study the learners' as well as their teachers' attitudes toward learning, teaching and testing processes in their own educational settings. 213 learners and 38 English language teachers who have been selected from state /non-state schools and two English language private institutes with different comparable curricula have been questioned. The items of the different questionnaires designed for the learners and the teachers constituted the measuring instruments of the study. The types of the questions included in the questionnaires can [m1] to form four patterns of the responses. These patterns can show the preference of learners/teachers over: 1- text based or fun task-based teaching materials 2- form-focused or meaning focused instruction 3- formative or summative testing procedures. The implications of the study can benefit both learners/teachers as well as course designers to reconsider the issues which are of great challenges to any educational curriculum in different educational settings.

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