EFL teachers' individual efforts for professional development

Abstract

The present study entitled, ‘EFL Teachers’ Individual Efforts for Professional Development’ was carried to explore the individual efforts made by the EFL teachers for their professional development and to suggest some recommendations for pedagogical implications. I used survey research design to accomplish this study. In order to carry out this study, I collected the data from forty secondary level EFL teachers teaching at community and private schools in Kathmandu district by using simple random sampling strategy. A set of questionnaire including close and open ended questions was used as the tool for data collection. The research found that a teacher can individually enhance the professional development skills by taking classes, learning from the people around him/her, gaining new skills and improving upon existing ones by writing journal, conducting action research, participating in trainings and reviewing the case studies. In terms of the activities related to individual efforts for professional development more than half of teachers always regard learning as the opportunity, all of the teachers always simplify and clarify the contents to make learning comprehensible to the learners and a clear majority of the teachers always use their expertise to solve the problems.Whereas, very few teachers never set goal and assess about its achievement, more than one third of the teachers never engage on teachers’ support groups, one fourth of the teachers never learn about the needs, interest and ability of students before teaching and half of the teachers never develop instructional materials by using locally available materials, most of the teachers never join professional networks. This thesis has been divided into five chapters. The first chapter gives an overview of the thesis along with background and context of the study, purposes of doing the research, significance of the research, delimitations of the study and operational definitions of the key terms. Whereas, the second chapter contains the relevant literature review, implications of the review of the study and conceptual framework. On the other hand, the third chapter deals with the methods and procedures followed to collect data for this study and instruments used to collect the data. While, the fourth chapter encompasses analysis and interpretation of the data. It presents the responses of the participants about the issues of the research. The fifth chapter provides the discussion on the result of the study that was analyzed in Chapter Four. It also contains recommendations for the policy level, practice level and further research level. Finally, in the final section, references and appendices are included.