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Professional development is central to teacher competence and, with particular attention to larger-scale, structured and formal professional development interventions (PDIs), this article discusses how the impact of professional development can be conceptualized and evaluated. Various kinds of impacts on teachers, organizations and systems, and students that PDIs can have are considered, and examples from actual PDIs in the field of English language teaching (ELT) are used to illustrate how such impacts can be assessed. Throughout, various challenges that arise in trying to demonstrate that PDIs make a difference are noted, and the article concludes by suggesting some criteria that can be used to guide the development of impact evaluation frameworks on PDIs.

This questionnaire study examined the beliefs, practices and constraints related to learner autonomy reported by 359 teachers (mainly expatriate) working on an English Preparatory Year Programme (P...

This article analyses the process of supervision by teacher educators and its influence on English language student teachers during a practicum in Kenya. The student teachers were enrolled in a four-year Bachelor of Education course for teaching English at secondary school level. Drawing on the perspectives of teacher educators, co-operating teachers and student teachers, this analysis suggests that supervision was brief and un-coordinated and that the feedback student teachers received was mainly evaluative, directive and focused on general, rather than subject-specific pedagogy. Student teachers’ concerns during the practicum were related largely to pleasing their supervisors and obtaining a pass mark, and this limited the extent to which student teachers developed the pedagogical reasoning that is considered to be the main goal of teaching practice by both the Kenya government and current literature in the field of language teacher education (LTE). This study has implications for the conduct of teaching practice on pre-service language teacher education courses in Kenya and more generally.

This paper aims to extend our understanding of what it means to be a language teacher by examining ways in which language teachers are seen to be different to teachers of other subjects. Language teachers’ distinctiveness was defined by over 200 practising and prospective language teachers from a range of contexts, and the analysis also included the opinions of specialists in mathematics, history, science and chemistry on the extent to which characteristics claimed to be distinctive of language teachers applied to these other subjects. The findings of the study suggest that language teachers are seen to be distinctive in terms of the nature of the subject, the content of teaching, the teaching methodology, teacher-learner relationships, and contrasts between native and non-native speakers. The study also raises methodological and conceptual issues of relevance to further research into this area. Key amongst these are the need to define language teachers’ distinctive characteristics with reference to specific contexts rather than globally, the importance of comparisons between insider views on such distinctiveness and those from outside language teaching, and the value of comparative studies of actual classroom practices of language teaching and other subjects.

Forms of reflective writing such as diaries and journals are widely acknowledged as important tools in promoting both the development and the understanding of teachers. However, little attention has been awarded to the role these forms of writing can play in the development and understanding of researchers. In this paper I draw on my own experience of keeping a research journal during a study of language teaching to illustrate the significant contribution journal writing can make to deepening researchers’ understanding of all facets of the research processes. I also argue that such journals can provide other researchers with illuminating insight into the research process. Given these benefits to both writers and readers of research journals, I claim that the issue of reflective writing by researchers in language teaching merits much more discussion that it has been awarded to date.