Teacher-centered and / or Student-centered Learning : English Language in Iran

This paper reports on research findings on leaner-centered approach compared to teacher-centered approach in teaching English grammar as a foreign language in Iranian high school context. It shows the need for grammar instruction in English language classes when roughly all education efforts are bottom-up explicit approach. One could compare and contrast these two learning approaches and try to evaluate the effectiveness of them. To this end, a cohort of 60 male homogeneous students at a junior high school in Tabriz, Iran participated in this study. All participants were native speakers of Azerbaijani and Persian aged around 16. There were two classes, including 30 students in each group (class) who were assigned to the control and experimental group. The experimental group received a treatment in passive-active voice, followed by a grammar preand post-test. All the tests consisted of multiple-choice, cloze, and fill-in-blanks, which were administered to study the homogeneity in their grammar knowledge over one month, and the results were compared. Two groups were observed, namely the control group (group A) or teacher-centered and the experimental group (group B) or student-centered. This experimental study also comprised classroom observations and teacher interview. When the students are given the opportunity to merge input in what they learn and how they learn, academic achievements and comprehension occur. The results support the implementation of teacher-centered process for the purpose of developing grammar knowledge of Iranian EFL learners. English classes cannot fulfill the learners’ needs on communication. The findings suggest the need for explicit teaching of grammar rules and their use through communicative tasks.


Introduction
Student-centered learning or active learning is a method of instruction in which the student is in the center of focus and the teacher has the least impression in (grammar) language instruction.Teacher-centered learning or passive learning, on the other hand, occurs in a setting that the teacher plays the main role.Bowers and Flinders (1990) identified teacher-centered model as an industrial production in which student is a product and behaviors of "exit skills" or "out comes".Also, the learner-centered approach means self and life-long education when teachers should change their traditional roles from teller to coordinator and from material users to teaching material providers (Baldauf & Moni, 2006).Richards and Rogers (2002) offer a comprehensive model of method and subsets.In this theme, method includes: 1) Approach: Body of theory that supports a method; 2) Design: Teaching plans and materials; 3) Procedure: What goes in classrooms during learning-teaching.This study focuses on the process of Iranian educational system.English, in Iran, is taught as a foreign language (EFL) within a context through particular course books which are neutral from cultural point of view (Khajavi & Abbasiian, 2011).The teachers are managers when the learning process heavily depends on pronouncement and enforcement of rules.All major educational policies like school systems, curriculum standards, course books, examination system, and so on are controlled by the Ministry of Education.Teaching English for seven years does not fulfill the learning purposes.Learners are highly motivated at the early stages of learning who acquire grammar by imitating, memorizing, and practicing all the input taken from the teacher and textbooks.Because of the simplicity of input they learn grammar data easily, so they have a good start in learning.However, the more they learn, the more the matters get difficult, and students are more and more discouraged of mastering grammar as a means of communication.They find that they know a lot about the English language, but can hardly say they know English.It is believed that family background, materials, teaching methods, homework, timetable, classroom activities, students' capacity, intelligence, motivation, teacher's perception of students' ability, teacher's knowledge and experience, educational facilities, the number of students in a class and so on, have a great impact on learning process.Therefore, efficient teachers are those who guide learners to acquire effective learning strategies and skills.According to Jahangard (2007), students' oral skills are not emphasized and examined in both university entrance examination and in the final exams of three years of senior high school and pre-university education.Teachers put less emphasis on oral drills, pronunciation, listening and speaking abilities.However, they emphasize reading, writing, grammar, and vocabulary.The focus is to pass tests and exams rather than to boost students' productive abilities."Grammatical exercises have been done as writing activities; even students at the university lack the necessary skills to use English communicatively (Farhadi, Jafarpoor & Birjandi, 1994).Teachers are the authority in the classroom and it is very important that students obtain the correct answers and possible equivalents in their own native language for all target language words.Indeed, learning is facilitated through attention to similarities between the target language and native language by translating from one to another.Since teachers cannot use a course book in line with their students' needs, their input is controlled by the prescribed curriculum and pushed to use grammar translation method, which has dominated since mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of the World War II.Grammar translation method is still used to teach Latin and Greek in some countries today to teach grammar and vocabulary.In Iran, English grammar teaching has been carried out within classrooms, in which learning is shaped in practices, teacher's management, and particular course books without any opportunity for the students to use it.Students are imposed to be passive and respectful to the teachers who are the reminders of old educational system and so inefficient to cope with new system, in which students are the main players with their needs.So, all these barriers in Iran's English education system block students from any communicative interactions even after graduation from high school or university.The present research was designed, so that it would provide a convincing answer to the following research question: Is it possible to complement student-centered learning with teacher-centered learning in English teaching among Iranian EFL learners?
This study tries to focus on the importance of communicative (top-down) approach or student-centered learning, any advantageous or disadvantageous, successes or failures compared to teacher-centered learning in Iranian context and how to increase the output in EFL learners in this system.The results of this study provide invaluable feedback for training teachers in urban and rural areas to provide related assistance for students' needs.Also, the results could be useful for authorities and educators in the ministry of education to alert them for primary and high school teachers' needs on any innovation and reform in educational system.

Teacher-centered Learning and Importance of Learning Grammar
A glimpse at the last century of language teaching practice reveals mixed choices of various methods and processes in language grammar teaching.Indeed it is scaled from "zero grammar" to "total grammar", according to their approach to grammar teaching.Language is an important device to communicate among people, learned as a second (ESL) or foreign language (EFL) beside their native language, sometimes in an artificial condition.To be successful in learning English, people must master English language from the beginning (Moradkhan & Sohrabiyan, 2009).
It is believed that most of the methods developed over the centuries have been still in use in various countries.It includes building of different sentence types, word order, compound sentences, word classes etc., and teachers continue to use grammar translation method through course books.Grammar exercises are done as writing activities (Hosseini, 2007); even students at the university lack the necessary skills to use English communicatively.Firstly, there is imbalance between teaching of speaking, listening, reading, and writing.Sometimes, writing exercises simply mean practicing grammatical structures instead of, for example, writing a diary or a letter to a friend.Even those grammatical instructions lack communicative goals, though all the rules are taught in students' native language.Secondly, course books lack any audio-visual facilities to encourage communicative activities outside the class.Also, course books do not promote grammar consciousness-raising tasks (Moradkhan & Sohrabiyan, 2009).Larsen-Freeman (2000) states that "Grammar is about form and one way to teach form is to give students rules; however, grammar is about much more than forms, and its teaching is ill-served if students are simply given rules".Besides, Fotos (2001) is of the opinion that "teacher-led classrooms and formal instruction are series of isolated language forms, versus a purely communicative classroom with its emphasis on group work and no focus on linguistic forms whatsoever".What is more tangible in her opinion is combination of form and meaning in communicative approach in linguistic teaching.
Teachers are the main players in English language teaching, especially their attitudes towards different skills acquired in the students' school life, supplying educational reform, and producing critical thinking in the students' performance not in education but in their future workplaces.It is believed critical thinking is that students should learn to develop skills to judge information, evaluate various events, and argue reasons.Also Dantas-Whitney (2002) and Faravan (2006) content that educators may place and develop an opportunity for this thinking ability in learners but they themselves need to be able to think of those terms and know to what extent these programs implicitly or explicitly could fulfill learners' needs.
Under the Iranian National Education Act (1390), the government has recently launched a series of educational reforms titled "The Program for Fundamental Evolution in Education and Training".Also, the curriculums will drastically alter at universities.The Ministry of Education will also introduce new courses designed to help students aged 12 to 17 acquire analytical skills.Generally, English education system suffers remarkably due to insufficient materials, and many problems.Though Iranian students learn English in formal education for at least ten years before graduation from university, these curriculums cannot meet the demands required by workplace.

Teacher-centered Learning in Iran (Observation)
Firstly, the traditional teacher-led or administer-centered learning are used more frequently than student-led learning.A student is viewed as learner, who passively receives information and teacher's role is information provider or evaluator to monitor learners to get the right answer.The problem is that it never let students use their potential, so the main focus is getting the learners to perform well on state-mandated tests rather than catering to students' need.This method is unsuccessful because the knowledge of students is judged based on their performance in the final exam scores (Lynch, 2010).
Course books barely fulfill students' and teachers' needs.They do not allow teachers to be creative in the class.Therefore, teachers do not rely firmly on their knowledge and performance.There is little motivation for innovation in teaching and the effort is to relay information or referring directly to the answers.First, teachers cannot choose a course book in line with their students' needs.Furthermore, teachers' input is controlled by the prescribed curriculum.Second, they couldn't develop tests which have positive washback on teaching and learning.Third, since obtaining a higher score is commonly important to both teachers and students, teaching process is controlled by grading pressure from students, parents, and school principals.Therefore, teachers are pushed to a close system in which all the focus is on getting good marks and performing well on the final exam.Also, the instruction process is affected by some social demands such as university entrance exam, being accepted to schools dedicated to intelligent students, etc. (Ghorbani, 2009).According to Khaniya (1990) "a large number of teachers help students cope with examinations in order to preserve their reputation as good teachers" (p.51) Teachers try not to lose their face because of their students' poor performance on public examinations, which lead them to teach English for testing purpose (Alderson & Wall, 1993).Consequently, for ELT learners in Iran, professionalism means to master textbooks and performing well in final exams, which are mostly grammar-oriented.So in this culturally-loaded pedagogic situation, the concept of high ability teacher is dependent on students' achievement in the exam, then the teacher "becomes" a good teacher (Ghorbani, 2009).Also, Huba and Freed (2000) state that the culture of teacher-led learning is competitive and individualistic; it means students cannot think aloud or interact, etc.In contrast, the culture of a student-center classroom is cooperative and supportive.Teachers use Persian or Azerbaijani language in class (because of lack of competence in English) to explain English grammar and to compare the language structures, so few questions are asked, if any, and all the questions are answered directly by the teacher without students' involvement.Students should be quiet in the class; indeed, a noisy class means that the teacher cannot manage the class, so she/he is not a good teacher.This is the main reason why teachers avoid noise and student-centered learning, while noise is unavoidable in a student-centered environment due to the exchange of information.

Student-centered Learning
The history of student-centered approach takes its roots from a constructivist theory, in which students learn more by doing and experiencing rather than by observing.In this theory, students are the initiators and architects of their own learning and knowledge making rather than passive 'vessels' who receive knowledge from expert teachers (Brown, 2008).This theory was first developed at the start of 20th century and was influenced by the writings of John Dewey and psychologist Lev Vygotsky.Its focus was on social constructivism which means how meaning, connections, and comprehensions are all influenced by social events.Duck Worth (2009) believes that students have better performance when they are asked to think about the matters instead of doing the thinking for them.In the other words, focus is on the learner's thoughts rather than on their (teachers) own.In an ideal student-led class, there is no imposition of information from teacher on learners or any effort to persuade learners to what teacher sees.According to Nunan (1999), the choices of what and how to teach should be made with reference to learners and the purpose of language teaching in order to get learners actively involved in the learning process: learning by doing (Pham Thi Hanh, 2005).Most of these studies, however, used only a modest number of classroom activities defined in very broad terms like 'conversation', 'error correction', or 'discussion' which may provoke different understanding among respondents and not reflect precisely the classroom activities in reality (Peacock, 1998, p. 246).

The Principles of Student-centered Learning
These principles based on Lynch (2010) are taking responsibility for learners' learning, directly involving them in the learning process and raising social activities like collaboration, meaningful communication, choice and cooperation.Here are some of these principles: 1. Students should develop their own knowledge by communication, critical thinking, and problem solving.
2. Instead of learning irrelevant materials, students could have this opportunity to learn directly related materials to their real life.Mostly, teachers have no answer on facing this question "why do I have to know this".
3. In Traditional Method, students' performance is assessed based on a test.Some students are well on testing with average in school and some are weak test takers but well on their curriculum.While these factors are not considered in teacher-led learning, it is a positive tool to "promote and diagnose learning assessment in student-led learning" (Huba & Freed, 2000) 4. "providing opportunities for students to use target language in order to negotiate meaning with teacher and other students in a group work, project work, also task-based interactions while providing guidance, modeling, and feedback about progress" (Adams, 2008).Peyton, et al. (2010) summarized student-centered approach into: promoting interaction among learners, using the native language when possible and appropriate, connecting instruction with learners' lives, and teaching learning strategies explicitly.Along this theory, Condelli and Wrigley (2009) in a study of adult ESL classes found positive gains in reading and oral English communication for students whose teachers used their native language for explanation, introducing new ideas, and clarifying the materials during instruction.For example, Thai language plays great role in its education system, especially in rural areas and this substitution should be regarded at early stages (Maskhao, 2002).However, The National Literacy Panel found no indication that using native language make improvement or academic achievement (August & Shanahan, 2006).While some studies revealed significant differences in learning outcomes, using learners' native language or giving the opportunity to interact in their own language, can enhance learners' sense of competence and self-worth.Research also suggests that literacy, knowledge, and other skills transfer across languages."If you learn something in one language, you either already know it in (i.e., transfer it to) another language or you can more easily learn it in another language" (Goldenberg, 2008, p. 15).
Regarding all these theories, in teacher-centered learning and student-centered learning classes in Iran, Azerbaijani or Persian is the language of instruction and doing comparison in English grammar structures with Persian, Azerbaijani, or Arabic is o so common.While grammar structures of these languages are completely unknown to students, how students can do comparisons.Brown (2008) believes that students' strategies are more beneficial than teachers who lead them to a deeper understanding level and critical thinking, "teachers can be agents for change in a world in desperate need of change: change from competition to corporation, from powerlessness to empowerment, from conflict to resolution, from prejudice to understanding".Also, teaching is a complex activity influenced by teacher quality, which is a crucial factor in student's performance by initiating critical thinking.This means that teacher's success occurs with better knowledge of the concept.

Problem
The prominent feature among teachers is when they intend to teach their students in order to take responsibility for their own learning.But they clearly don't know how to involve learners in teaching and learning processes, so it is essential both teacher and learner feel this need and responsibility.Given these uncertainties, findings have shown teachers are not prepared well to implement the new process either in theory or in practice in an EFL class.Although teachers and students have positive attitudes toward the policy, it is difficult for them as policy implementers to adapt to new policy requirements, when they have not been trained well.So the outcome is affected by individual teachers' beliefs which impact their individual teaching methods and processes (Baldauf & Moni, 2006).Lynch (2010) believes that since students feel more autonomous and responsible, teachers should give away the majority of their class power and make the students to self-direct their learning.But he also refers to some deficiencies in this approach, 1) students may suddenly participate in class, 2) students listen to the teacher without any contribution, and 3) students just copy down notes.Many students rarely try to change their comfort zone by the help of their teachers, for they believe that teachers are paid to what they are teaching.Another problem may occur in inversion of approaches as seen in Iranian, Thai, Korean and Japanese culture, where students should be respectful to their teachers, thus changing the policy may threat this respect (Baldauf & Moni, 2006).

Ways to Incorporate Student-centered Learning
Incorporation based on Brown (2008): 1) Start with small changes in the routine of teaching.
2) Asking more questions in the class from students rather than providing answers.
3) Teachers see themselves as a guide on the side not as a sage on the stage.
Regarding all advantageous on changing the educational policy which occurred in Thai educational system to improve the English language learning, it is unrealistic to assume that all learners are able to enjoy proper instructional method in their learning process especially young learners.So, negotiation between teachers and learners in developing a language program is not an all-or-nothing process (Nunan, 1999).
According to Catalone (1995), teachers' roles on shifting from TCL to SCL are divided into several models: 1) Model thinking/processing skills.
2) Know where you want your students to be cognitive.
3) Develop questions that facilitate student exploration.4) Using visual tools to assist students in this process.5) Provide group-learning setting.

6) Use analogies and metaphors.
Provide a non-threatening no risk mechanism for indirect dialogue between teacher and students(s).
Based on intellectual division, thinking proceeds from lower level (knowledge and comprehension) to higher level one and modes of thinking are divided into convergent and divergent thinking, and evaluation.Whatever model chosen, two points should be considered.First, the teacher should be aware of the level of thinking used by learner in lectures, quizzes, etc.Second, teacher should share these with student.The most useful visual tool in a student-centered is mind mapping (graphic organization).The construction of mind mapping illustrates the point that learning is a process not an end product.In group learning, students are sent to the blackboard in small groups to work out homework exercises, then teacher moves to groups to observe whether or not learners do the tasks well, both as learner or instructor, then solves the problems.Students are active, asking questions and answering.Now how many students participate?How much class time is actually spent on group learning?Or how deep students are involved could be studied.However, there is an essential key to successful usage in which students should have a sense that teacher like to hear the new opinions and concerns them (Catalano, 1995).To increase the learning rate, learners need to make a correlation between what they have learned to the real world.It can be affirmed that one strategy is to bring the artifacts and information from where the students live and work into the class, ask them to talk or write about their experiences in real life in target language, which could be used as a task-based activity.They read each other's narratives, give feedback and revise their work.Teacher's leadership and involvement with proper process leads to High Corporation sought in a student-centered class, for example, talking about map and proper addresses (Peyton, et al., 2010).

Method
In non-randomized controlled trails, assignments are used to form two groups of study, so that they are similar on average in both observable and unobservable characteristics.Any difference in outcomes between the groups is due to the intervention along with statistical precision.The method of this study is quasi-experimental design.Since the groups in quasi-experimental design may differ, the study represents the intervention and comparison groups as they are the same on observable characteristics.

Participants
For studying the above-mentioned research question, a total of 60 homogeneous male intermediate level students at a junior high school grade 1 in Tabriz, Iran, participated in this study.The participants were all native speakers of Azerbaijani and Persian aged 16-17.They were divided based on their class into two groups: 30 students in each group.

Instrumentation
An instrument was employed in the study: A language proficiency test (pre-test) was chosen from a high school course book grade 1 (2011-2012) to ensure the homogeneity of the participants and as a base for dividing students into two groups.The test consisted of 30 grammar items on active-passive voice (p.94-97) to be answered in 30 minutes.The test format consisted of multiple choices; fill in the blank and cloze test.All treatments were observed and recorded.Three treatments were held on passive-active voice for two weeks followed by a post-test to clarify the result.

Materials
Treatments used for both the experimental and control groups were derived from the lesson eight of English book grade one on active-passive voice, a treatment of grammar structure was given explicitly.The grammatical focus of the text was on active to passive inversion in simple present, past and future tenses, past participle, and to be verbs.

Teacher-centered Class (Observation)
1) The teacher first began to introduce to be verbs briefly.The English classes usually last one hours and 15 minutes, but the efficient time spent totally on teaching and learning was 45 minutes.
2) The language of instruction was completely Azerbaijani.
3) There was a bottom-up explanation in passive-active voice in the first fifteenth minutes.4) There was a description of object in the sentence with three examples in five minutes.Then the teacher referred briefly to active-passive inversion formula: object + to be + past participle.It took about 20 minutes.5) 10 to 15 minutes was spent on doing exercises in the book.There were 20 examples and a few was done as an example.Domen (2005) believes that grammar teaching could be given five to ten minutes in a teacher-centered class followed by examples.6) There was some explanation on regular and irregular verbs.7) There were a few misunderstandings on "ed" both in irregular verbs and adjectives, which the teacher explained directly but briefly.8) A few questions were asked due to unclear explanations from the teacher.

Student-centered Class (Observation)
1) Talking about the new process for five minutes.
2) Description of regular and irregular verbs by students only by giving example, no explanation by teacher.
3) Involving students on talking about active-passive voice.4) Focus on oral practice in the target language.5) Not all the students were involved in speaking, but those who had already attended private language institutes.6) Not much information was provided by the teacher.7) Students were continually ordered to be polite and quiet, even though the noise was because of problem solving task.8) Students answered the questions but not correctly.9) Competition among students on responding.10) Some learners were active while others were aloof.11) Controlling the class only at the first ten minutes.12) No audio/visual aids were available.

Results
In this section, a descriptive analysis of quantitative data is presented based on the research question of the study.The descriptive statistics of the pre-test and post-test, by the two groups: student-centered and teacher-centered before and after the treatment, is reported in Table 1.Some significant differences were observed in the pre-test's mean scores.The SCL, however, obtained higher mean scores than the TCL, 12.5 to 5.82.Whereas, in the post-test, average point for SCL was 12.24 and 9.04 for TCL.Though in both pre-and post-tests high mean score belongs to SCL, the comparison shows that TCL win the final mean.It is because there was a steady increase in pre-and post-test grades in TCL class.

Discussion
The findings obtained in this research led to the conclusion that there was a significant difference between the mean of two groups allowing the researchers to confirm the null hypothesis.Therefore the results support the implementation of teacher-centered process for the purpose of developing grammar learning in Iranian EFL learners.The data generated by this study suggests that implementing student-centered activities within a communicative domain would be interesting to both teachers and learners, but could not fulfill the learners' needs on English education in both communicative and traditional learning.TCL's results in pre-test were low in comparison to SCL, but there was a steady increase in post-test.All represent that regarding long term learning of English language in teacher-centered process made it possible for students to improve their learning.Though students prefer student-centered process and communicative approach and were active in the class, the results of the study are different which affirms TCL through explicit (bottom-up) method.The values also suggest the need for explicit rules which can be more justified if they are embedded via communicative tasks.Through tasks and processes students not only learn grammar explicitly, but they can put it into practice, therefore grammatical concepts might be involved in interaction.This study is not going to reject the roles of other techniques on developing grammar learning in learners, but proposes that new tasks employed by teachers could correlate the preplanned syllabuses into the suitable tool in foreign language learning.It is believed that grammar consciousness raising approach serves as a way to ensure that learners absorb the input while they are involved in implicit communicative activities.Nevertheless, learning grammar is not the goal of language teaching, but a tool to build communicative abilities.An interview with a student goes as follows: I don't like sitting quietly in class and just listening to the teachers.I hope the teacher would give the class more opportunity to speak English.Then he will correct our ways of speaking and I think our lesson will be interesting if students can play a more active role.Also, my friends and me can share our points of view and learn some skills from one another.The teacher's role is instruction and explanation, students need practice.I don't like anything in teacher-centered.The class is ours and we want to have our own leaders.It (teacher-centered activity) makes us passive.Students need to practice in English very much.
If it is aimed to have successful students in Iran, there is an urgent need to deploy proficient English teachers, or develop pre-service or in-service teacher training centers to develop autonomous learners through SCL approach.
Teachers need to be given a chance to act freely on teaching, to train them on developing their understanding in the implementation of various approaches, and to reflect how they perceive the system should work.By improving the contents of the secondary course books, we can establish proper practical reforms along with perceptual and informed educators, can use any proper instructional approach or method, and can develop optimistic view and interest toward learning English among learners.Language learning can be enhanced by raising positive attitudes toward utilizing new approaches among teachers and parents, encouraging well-formed changes in teacher training system in universities or related centers, implementing new ways on teaching students, avoiding any teacher-selfness, focusing to group activities, raising students' intellectual capacity, and using educational facilities such as language laboratories, and audio-visual aids.This mandated reform is unlikely to be successfully undertaken without listening to the teachers' voices and responding to their concerns.However, after a comparison of classroom methods and interviews with students and teachers, some gaps were identified among self-reports of the teacher and students and classroom observations.Though both confirmed that SCL is more efficient than TCL, the findings illustrated that practically TCL is more acceptable and applicable in Iranian English language teaching system.
Regarding earlier thoughts on changing educational policy from teacher-centered learning to student-centered learning, embarking on these could meet some resistance at least in the following ways: 1) Some students do not like to become the focus of attention and do classroom activities and instead prefer to stay in their more comfortable zone and simply be physically present but mentally inactive.
2) The common belief is that the student-centered classroom is lacking the sufficient rigor or discipline, whereby most of us received our formal education in the teacher-centered model.This approach tried to teach in a way to "keep the standards high".
3) Perhaps the greatest resistance to perform such a process transformation relates to ourselves, say, losing or menacing the authoritarian control in the classroom on what is called as Utter Chaos.It is safe to stand behind the podium and relay information than to worry about the actual data collection and more activities.All these issues become personal, when we face this question: Do we really want to take risk on any change with all its potential failures or satisfactory results?

Table 1 .
Descriptive statistics of the initial language proficiency test

Table 5 .
Group statistics on post-test in two groups

Table 6 .
Independent samples test

Table 7 .
Group statistics

Table 8 .
Independent sample test

Table 9 .
Tests of between-subjects effects