Moving towards a Globalized Definition of Professional Ethics in Teaching: The Case of EFL University Instructors

Professionalism has always been an important facet of English language teaching from the very early days onwards. Different aspects of professionalism have been visited and revisited through time by different practitioners, teacher trainers etc. and professional ethics, as one of the core aspects of professionalism has recently been debated, discussed and investigated. However, there seems to be a lack of more localized investigations on how ethics is perceived in different teaching communities including EFL ones. Therefore, the current study would firstly provide a summary of global definitions of professional ethics and then move towards illustrating a local definition of ethics. This localized definition of ethics is provided through administering a semi-structured interview with 50 female and male EFL university instructors. Also, after doing the analysis, two experts in the field were asked to validate the accumulated results. The outcomes exhibited that Iranian EFL university instructors possess a very limited worldview and understanding of professional ethics when it comes to two of the components of professional ethics namely as ‘commitment to organization and commitment to society’. As a result, measures for increasing teachers’ professional ethics must be taken as one of the means of continuing professional development in Iran as an EFL context.