Teacher educators play a seminal role in charting a clear roadmap and shedding light on a prosperous pedagogical journey for novice teachers. Though professional development programs today act as a proper springboard for scaffolding the incomplete knowledge of fledgling teachers, there seems to be a dire need for expanding the scope of such in-service programs to include more elements of successful teaching such as Inquiry-Based Pedagogy (IBP). Driven mainly by this aspiration, the current study strove to explore the teacher educators’ perceptions of IBP, considering the role and importance of inquiry in EFL instruction as well as the challenges that impede the practices of IBP. To conduct the study, 100 EFL teacher-educators from three Farhangian Universities in Iran were chosen through cluster random sampling. A 40-item questionnaire and a 10-item interview protocol were the instruments utilized for data collection. Data analysis via NVivo program, Factor Analysis, and multivariate analysis revealed teacher educators’ positive perceptions of IBP. The findings offer useful implications for curriculum designers, EFL teachers, and teacher educators, particularly as regards the integration of IBP into education. تفاصيل المقالة

Based on the importance of virtual classrooms and due to the inevitability of using them in difficult situations such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the current study was an attempt to investigate the perception of high school EFL teachers toward virtual learning systems' experience. Also, probing the perception of high school EFL teachers toward virtual learning systems' opportunities, exploring the perception of high school EFL teachers toward virtual learning systems' challenges and threats, and informing the educational society of the solutions to the barriers of virtual learning systems based on the perception of high school EFL teachers were the other objectives of the current study. To this end, the attitudes of 120 EFL teachers (males=67, females=53) with the age range of 30 to 50 who were teaching at different high schools of West Azerbaijan province, Urmia, Iran, were gathered via a researcher-made questionnaire. The results of the study show that although high school teachers faced some barriers such as low internet access, low interaction, and low concentration by learners, actually they actually have positive attitudes toward the use of digital learning, particularly in virtual classrooms. Furthermore, the findings showed that data retention power and quick and easy access were favored by most of the teachers, and they believed these two items can be regarded as positive opportunities. In addition, teachers presented some comments such as adding visuals to the virtual classrooms, using chat boxes, and planning interaction hints to resolve the virtual classrooms’ existing problems such as poor connection and low concentration. The implications of the study will be discussed. تفاصيل المقالة