Did You Post That? A Study on Iranian English LanguageTeachers’ Practices on Instagram

Internet-based technologies have significantly influenced english language teaching over the last 20 years, and social media has become a common form of communication for many teachers and students inside and outside of traditional classes. instagram, with its distinctive features in language teaching, is the 6th most popular social network sites worldwide (omnicare, 2020). the present qualitative study focused on four major issues: iranian english teachers’ perspectives toward instagram as an online teaching tool, how these teachers prepared the instagram teaching material, how they approached the issue of interaction, and what marketing procedures they followed to advertise their instagram pages. in doing so, ten iranian instagram english teachers were interviewed to collect the required data. the bodies of data were explored through coding procedures, and the emerging thematic structure was used to investigate the main concerns. the results demonstrated that teachers held a positive attitude toward using instagram as a supplementary teaching tool, an interface that can add to the quality of teaching and learning, but it cannot necessarily replace the more formal forms of teaching. furthermore, the participants believed that the english material developed for this platform should have been theoretically accurate, informative, authentic, visually attractive, and enjoyable. from three different possible types of interactions on this platform, only the interaction between the teachers and the followers was investigated. participants took diverse attitudes towards their interactions with their followers by offering different justifications for their practices. regarding the concern of marketing, conflicting opinions were stated by the participants due to the number of their followers. it can be concluded that there is a need for a regulatory agency‎ to commit teachers to spread high-quality content and enhance the instagram consumers’ power of judgment to discern quality content.

Did You Post That? A Study on Iranian English LanguageTeachers’ Practices on Instagram

Internet-based technologies have significantly influenced English Language Teaching over the last 20 years, and social media has become a common form of communication for many teachers and students inside and outside of traditional classes. Instagram, with its distinctive features in language teaching, is the 6th most popular Social Network Sites worldwide (Omnicare, 2020). The present qualitative study focused on four major issues: Iranian English teachers’ perspectives toward Instagram as an online teaching tool, how these teachers prepared the Instagram teaching material, how they approached the issue of interaction, and what marketing procedures they followed to advertise their Instagram pages. In doing so, ten Iranian Instagram English teachers were interviewed to collect the required data. The bodies of data were explored through coding procedures, and the emerging thematic structure was used to investigate the main concerns. The results demonstrated that teachers held a positive attitude toward using Instagram as a supplementary teaching tool, an interface that can add to the quality of teaching and learning, but it cannot necessarily replace the more formal forms of teaching. Furthermore, the participants believed that the English material developed for this platform should have been theoretically accurate, informative, authentic, visually attractive, and enjoyable. From three different possible types of interactions on this platform, only the interaction between the teachers and the followers was investigated. Participants took diverse attitudes towards their interactions with their followers by offering different justifications for their practices. Regarding the concern of marketing, conflicting opinions were stated by the participants due to the number of their followers. It can be concluded that there is a need for a regulatory agency‎ to commit teachers to spread high-quality content and enhance the Instagram consumers’ power of judgment to discern quality content.