EFL Students’ Perceptions of Their Teachers’ Narratives: AreThey Relevant or Irrelevant?

Second/foreign language teachers tell stories for various reasons in their classrooms, but not all classroom stories are necessarily relevant to students and their learning. The present study aimed to find out whether English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students perceive the narratives of their teachers as relevant or irrelevant to their learning. Participants were ۳۲ upper-intermediate EFL students who were studying at a private English language teaching institute in Mashhad, Iran. They were asked to respond to an open-ended survey in which they were supposed to say whether their teachers’ narratives were relevant or irrelevant and then report on the reasons why they found the narratives relevant or irrelevant. The students’ responses were analyzed using a paradigmatic approach typical of qualitative content analysis to explore the students’ perceptions of their teachers’ narratives concerning their relevance. The findings showed that most of the EFL students found their teachers’ narratives relevant when they discussed perseverance through personal struggles in learning English because they could make a relationship between those narratives and their current learning difficulties. On the other hand, the narratives which were related to the personal life of the teachers, including their relationship with their wives and children, were found irrelevant as they had nothing to do with the student's learning. The results of the present study suggest that it would be more helpful if EFL teachers think twice before they decide to share a narrative with their students as some special types of stories are more relevant to their student's learning.