Keeping Teaching Journal For Teacher Professional Development: A Narrative Inquiry

Abstract

This research study entitled Keeping Teaching Journal in Teacher Professional Development: A Narrative Inquiry was carried out to explore experiences of keeping teaching journal of EFL teachers and to identify the role of keeping teaching journal for teacher professional development. The research was carried out through narrative inquiry research design. The data was collected from five Bachelor and Masters level English teachers, who were selected using purposive non-random sampling strategy. Data for this study were collected by conducting in-depth interview. The researcher visited and revisited the study area to collect and validate the data. After the collection of the data they were categorized into two themes and analyzed and interpreted by using thematic analysis. Under one theme, it was found that there were different experiences of keeping teaching journal in improving English classroom, which were, equal participation of students towards learning, understanding learners, choosing appropriate methodology, and encouraging learners. Similarly, in other theme, it was found that keeping teaching journal have a huge number of benefits, such as, to reflect own teaching, to use in similar kinds of context in the future, to solve students’ personal problems, to trigger insights about the teaching, and it makes teacher network stronger. This thesis has been divided into five chapters. The first chapter consists of background of the study, statement of the problem, objectives of the study, research questions, significance of the study, delimitations of the study and operational definitions of the key terms. Similarly, the second chapter deals with the review of the theoretical and empirical literature, implications of the review for the study and conceptual framework. Likewise, the third chapter sheds light on the methods and procedures of the study, under this, research design, population sampling and its procedure, research tool, data source, data collection and analysis procedure and ethical consideration is discussed. The fourth chapter presents the analysis of data and interpretation of the results. Finally, the fifth chapter encompasses overall findings, conclusion and recommendations.