EVALUATION OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF TEACHERS’ PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT COURSES OF THE HIGHER EDUCATION COMMISSION (HEC) UNDER ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING REFORMS (ELTR) PROJECT

Abstract

The study primarily represents the state of the teachers’ professional development in English Language Teaching (ELT) at higher levels in a country where overall higher education has been passing through a critical phase of development and reform since 2001. The study mainly evaluated the effectiveness of the short-term courses of the ELTR Project Phase-1 for teachers’ professional development. These courses were offered under the Faculty Development, Research and Publications, Testing and Evaluation and the CALL sub-committees. The study was mainly carried out with the help of a detailed questionnaire administered to the randomly selected 740 trainees, asking them about different aspects of the courses. The researcher recorded semi-structured interviews from twenty resource persons and five trainees each from CALL and EAP courses, during and after 6 months, to evaluate the overall effectiveness of these courses for teachers’ professional development. The researcher recorded semi-structured interviews from five heads of the English departments and from three HEC officials to further probe into the effectiveness of these courses. The researcher applied Chi -Square test and also observed and analyzed three available short courses on CALL, Research and Testing to cross-validate the findings obtained through the questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. Finally, the researcher analyzed sample documents like outlines of course modules and certain pertinent reports using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six phase model to see the effectiveness of the teachers’ professional courses and concerned activities. The researcher found that teachers’ professional development courses were effective to some extent as the trained teachers could improve upon their teaching methods and increase and update their knowledge. However, the ELTR Project could have made these courses more successful through ensuring need-based and merit-based selection, appointment of resource persons on merit, provision of the same state-of-the-art facilities to the trainees at their workplaces as at the training settings, and finally by making the resource persons accountable by at least informing them (the trainees) that they would be followed up for internal or external evaluations. At the end, some recommendations have been made for improving the teachers’ professional development courses and for bringing in positive changes in terms of planning and implementation of future ELT Projects.