Opening up a New Pathway to the Future of ELT: Construction and Validation of a Scale for the Measuremen of L2 Teachers’ Life -Responsive Language Teaching Perceptionst of L2 Teachers’

It is widely acknowledged that learning life skills is a fruitful practice that helps individuals to deal effectively with everyday challenges of life. With the advent of Applied ELT as a new paradigm in second/foreign language studies, ELT has gained a new and contributory status among other disciplines (Pishghadam, 2011). In this connection, it seems that due to their unique features which can provide ample opportunities for enhancing learners’ life qualities as well as satisfying their educational needs, ELT classes can be sites where these life skills should be dealt with and improved more than any other educational context, hence the need for incorporating life skills training into the ELT curriculum in the form of Life Syllabus (Pishghadam & Zabihi, 2012). As one of the first attempts at eliciting language teachers’ beliefs about the incorporation of life skills training into the ELT curriculum, the present study was conducted to construct a Life-Responsive Language Teaching Beliefs questionnaire in the foreign language context of Iran, making use of the defining indexes of life skills education proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO). Given the meritorious factorability of the present sample, the scale w as then validated by conducting the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). The results of several EFA analyses revealed that a four-factor solution, i.e. (a) Life-wise Empowerment, (b) Adaptability Enhancement, (c) Pro -social Development and (d) Life-over-language Preference, would yield a parsimonious grouping of the items. Finally, some pathways to future research were mapped out for other interested researchers to give Applied ELT more empirical adequacy.