EFL Instructors’ Attitudes towards Professional Self-Development

Abstract

This descriptive study aimed to find out whether instructors practiced self-development activities, whether some factors hindered the practice of self-development activities, and to what extent the instructors implemented self-development activities in their classes to solve a problem. Additionally, it aimed to find out whether the instructors differed in the use of self-development activities in terms of age, gender, experience, education level, and teaching hours. This study was conducted with 348 EFL instructors and four teacher trainers. Three research instruments including a questionnaire, interviews with teacher trainers, and four EFL instructors were used to investigate the self-development activities which were journal writing, self-appraisal, peer-observation, reading, writing a research paper, and action research. The analysis of data revealed that EFL instructors practiced self-development activities on a limited scale except for peer observation, which was carried out as a school policy. The results also showed that the workload was the most important hindrance in practicing self-development activities. Additionally, EFL instructors did not transfer the information gathered from self-development activities in their EFL classes to solve problems and they differed in the use of self-development activities to some extent in terms of age, gender, teaching experience, ELT qualifications like BA, MA, or Ph.D. and teaching hours.

Keywords

• self-development
• professional development
• peer-observation
• action research
• self-appraisal