Iranian EFL Teachers’ Attitudes towards In-Service Professional Development Programs

Abstract

The present study was developed to investigate the general and specific attitudes of Iranian EFL teachers toward the current in-service education programs. Two questionnaires regarding the Teachers' Attitudes toward In-service Teacher Education Programs (TAIT) and Teachers' Attitudes toward Professional development (TAP) were used to collect the data. Prior to the main study, the TAIT questionnaire was piloted on fourteen high school teachers of English in order to test its reliability. The questionnaires were administered to eighty Iranian EFL teachers and results indicated that Iranian EFL teachers did not have any specific attitude toward the impact of in-service teacher training on improving their abilities and there was no significant difference among their attitudes toward the efficiency of in-service teacher training programs. According to the results, Iranian EFL teachers believed that the contents of teacher training programs are far from the reality of the actual classroom situations. Generally, results showed that participants were slightly satisfied with in-service teacher education programs. Neither teachers' experience nor gender of participants had any effect on the results of study.