English Language Teachers' Perceptions Towards Professionalism

Abstract

The thesis entitled 'English Language Teachers' Perceptions Towards Professionalism' was an attempt to explore various beliefs of English language teachers about English, learners, learning, teaching and the teachers themselves. Both primary and secondary sources of data were used in this study. For primary sources of data, ten secondary level English teachers were purposively selected from Ilam district as the sample and they were interviewed using an interview schedule and then a set of questionnaire was distributed to them to explore their beliefs. Then, the data collected were analyzed and interpreted descriptively. After the analysis, it was found that a majority of the teachers believed that English is an important language and learning is an interactive process for which learners need to be motivated, enthusiastic and need sufficient amount of exposure to learning. They further believed that for effective learning and teaching English learners' linguistic and cultural background should be taken into consideration. Moreover, they did not believe that learning and teaching English should not be confined only to school. They also believed that English learning and teaching should not be based on from-focused instruction, rather guided by the principles of communicative methodology. Finally, they believed that English teachers needed to possess a good command of the English language in terms of fluency, accuracy and appropriacy. This study consists of four chapters and other sub-chapters. The first introductory chapter consists of the general backgrounds, review of the related literature, objectives and significance of the study. The second chapter deals with the methodology which comprises sources of data, population of the study, sampling procedure, tools and process of data collection and limitations of the study. Likewise, the third chapter is concerned with the analysis and interpretation of the data collected from the primary sources which were conducted using tables, percentage and mean. The last chapter incorporates the findings and the recommendations made after the data analysis which is followed by references and appendices.