Homework assignments provide a channel of communication between students and teachers
especially in an EFL context where there is little exposure to English language out of the classroom
context. Thus, exploring attitudes and homework features may provide teachers with useful
information to know how to plan their homework assignments to improve students’ learning
opportunities. This study aimed to explore both teachers’ and learners’ attitude towards homework;
the difficulties faced by both teachers and learners with regard to homework as well as the assignment
characteristics of English-major versus Non-English-major teachers. The study participants were
120 randomly selected adult male and female EFL learners and 81 EFL teachers. The data were
collected through questionnaires and subsequent semi-structured interviews. SPSS 24 software
was used to analyze the questionnaire data and interviews were recorded, transcribed, coded and
categorized for further analysis. The results indicated that students had positive attitudes towards
homework assignments. There was no significant difference between students’ attitude towards
homework given by English Major (EM) and Non-English Major (NEM) teachers. The data showed
that teachers do feel that homework is essential to students’ language development. Similarly, there
was no significant difference among EM versus NEM teachers in their attitudes toward homework.
The results revealed the following reasons for the difficulties that teachers and learners faced in
assigning/doing homework assignments respectively. Those reasons varied from not learning the
required concept, not knowing the instruction, not enjoying homework, not paying attention
when homework assignments were presented, not understanding homework instruction, copying
homework or cheating, the absence of related and meaningful tasks, parents’ lack of knowledge,
lack of word power and grammar, to anxiety and stress of homework. The findings illustrated that
there were some differences between EM and NEM teachers in terms of amount, skill area used, and
degree of individualization in their homework assignments. The results of this study offer a number
of pedagogical implications for teachers, curriculum developers, and institute managers.