EFL Teacher Education: Where Do Trainers’ and Trainees’ Criteria Match?

Despite chronic and widespread concerns about professional abilities of EFL teachers and the success of teacher education programmes, surprisingly little attention is paid to how these abilities are being evaluated and whether trainers and trainees agree upon shared evaluation criteria. Elsewhere, it is often observed that EFL teachers at different levels of elementary, high school and university are being evaluated in entirely different ways, ranging from a strict interventionist evaluation often in case of elementary school teachers to an empowering autonomy in favour of university instructors. This work, therefore, intended to make a descriptive study of the current state of affairs in how evaluation takes places in EFL teacher education programmes in Iran and to collect and categorize pre-service trainees’ feedback to evaluation, in an attempt to shed light on some major mismatch areas between EFL trainers and trainees. Results indicated that many trainees were evaluated not by how they trained to be effective teachers, but by how they performed during training sessions as students. The required data were obtained from a variety of qualitative resources, including interviews and questionnaires, in a teacher education programme held at Islamic Azad University, Karaj Branch-Iran in 2011.