The Erosion of EFL Teachers’ Content and Pedagogical-content Knowledge Throughout the Years of Teaching Experience

AbstractTheoreticians have long been offering EFL teachers worldwide lots of methodological contributions. But do the teachers ever try to keep themselves in touch with those contributions so as to improve their teaching task? And do they also practically try to enhance their content knowledge as required of especially every non-English teacher of English? There was an attempt to answer the mentioned questions in this paper. To do so, one hundred and fifteen school level EFL teachers in Marand, East Azerbaijan, Iranwere studied.The subjects’ content and pedagogical-content knowledge were measured through two sets of multiple-choice questions. The results of the investigation indicated that regretfully a remarkable number of teachers possess much less than expected amount of both content and pedagogical-content knowledge, which is also triggered by their amount of teaching experience. That is, the more years they teach, the more amount of content and pedagogical-content knowledge they lose. So a necessity is felt for EFL teachers to be strongly and continuously motivated in order to update themselves in terms of both of the above-mentioned types of knowledge. Both content and pedagogical-content knowledge can be thought of as keys to act as a professional EFL teacher in order toefficiently serve EFL learners