Collaborative teaching, which initially emerged as a tool to provide support for increasing the inclusion of students with disabilities in the United States in the 1970s and to promote students’ learning (Friend, 2007; Mastropieri, McDuffie, & Scruggs, 2007; Murray, 2004 as cited in Jeon, 2010), referred to a general education teacher being paired with a special education teacher in an inclusive classroom and working as partners to teach a diverse group of students (Friend, 2008).

Collaborative teaching, which is defined by Friend and Cook (1995) as a style of interaction between at least two parties voluntarily engaged in shared decision- making as they work toward a common goal (as cited in Dove & Honigsfeld, 2010), is now a popular and significant concept within the field of language education. In the form of co-teaching, “teachers share responsibility for the development, implementation, and evaluation of classroom instruction designed to meet students’ needs” (Welch et al. 1999 as cited in Jeon, 2010). Collaborative teaching, or in other terms, co-teaching or team-teaching, has been implemented differently in many contexts either as an intercultural team work of one native English teacher and non-native English teacher working together in a classroom setting in the process of planning, instruction, and evaluation (Luo, 2014; Park, 2014; Jeon, 2010; Igawa, 2009; Carless, 2006) or as an interdisciplinary team teaching between content-area teacher and ESL teacher to enhance students’ learning (Gladman, 2015; Bell & Baecher, 2012; Baecher & Bell, 2011; Davison, 2006). Sometimes it also takes place for professional development purposes (Luo, 2014). As Nunan (1992) claims, teachers collaborate for a number of reasons such as wishing to experiment with alternative ways of organizing teaching, to promote a philosophy of cooperation rather than competition, to create an environment in which they teach and learn from each other.

          Perry and Stewart (2005) describe collaborative teaching as a part of a continuum of collaboration that varies depending on the levels of coordination and shared responsibility. At the low level of collaboration, courses are planned by a group of faculty and later taught and evaluated individually by the members of the group, whereas at the highest level of collaboration, courses are co-planned, co-taught, and evaluated by a pair or a group of teachers. In the light of this, in the present study, co-teaching referred to two or more instructors working together in the process of planning the content of the courses, discussing how to deliver instruction, preparing instructional materials as well as testing and assessment tools for the same group of students but teaching them separately. Hence, the main goal of this study was to explore the views of EFL instructors who engaged in such a collaborative process, on collaborative teaching, and which conditions they perceived as necessary to sustain successful collaboration. The study sought to answer the following questions:

1.  In what ways do EFL instructors engage in collaboration in language teaching?

2. What are EFL instructors’ beliefs on collaborative teaching in language teaching?

a) Based on the perceptions of 4 EFL instructors, what are the benefits of collaborative teaching practice?

b) Based on the perceptions of 4 EFL instructors, what are the challenges of collaborative teaching practice?

3.  What conditions do EFL teachers perceive as necessary to sustain successful collaboration?

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