C- Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)
3.5 Teachers’ professionalism and professional development
The approach of teachers to the use of textbooks in EFL can be linked to their confidence as teachers and this in turn may depend upon the adequacy of their training and their depth of knowledge.
Taking the teaching approaches, ALM, GTM and CLT, as indicated in the section 3.1, into account, it is difficult to set standards for teaching and teachers themselves and the process of developing teachers as qualified professionals.
A lot has been said and done on the area of learner-centeredness in language education, but not as much has been said or done about teacher development towards such a pedagogical approach. Vieira (2000, p.222) believes that professional development of teachers towards pedagogy in the foreign language classroom might rest upon the assumption that there is a close interplay between reflective teaching and pedagogy. According to Evetts (2006) and Freidson (2001), professionals should have total control of their individual work, provided they have the necessary knowledge, skills and values. The fact that they have a right of discretion to appreciate their students’ individual differences is also an aspect that solely describes their professionalism.
According to the McKinsey report entitled ‘How the World’s Best-performing School Systems come out on Top’, teachers are exclusively considered as the key players and the most important people in the success of students (Barber and Mourshed, 2007).
The McKinsey report also insists that the variation in the quality of student learning in schools is largely controlled by the quality of teachers in that school. Research carried out by Hattie (2009) also found that the quality of teachers in a school has a more significant impact to the positive learning of students than the quality of the laid down curriculum itself, prescribed teaching methods, roles played by parents or the structures of the school.
Hattie (2009) explains how teachers play a major role in changing the students’
thinking and attitude towards learning; it requires that the teachers always stay alert and observant so as to be able to understand the students and provide them with progressive and positive development oriented experiences. Moreover, the teachers are also expected to provide solutions to psychological problems encountered by the students and help them create learning strategies in regard to the successive and deep learning levels. In order for teachers to be professional in their response to the needs of their learners, there should always be a significant interconnection between trust, autonomy and competence as described by Snoek (2010).
Snoek (2010) explains that the exact role of all professionals in their relevant service to clients (like the kind of service offered by teachers to students and parents) absolutely requires professional autonomy focused on the learner needs, and this requires public trust. Public trust needs to be based entirely on successive use of teacher professionalism, and not necessarily on the magnitude of their respective results of such professionalism to meet the needs of their students. The adoption of these results would create an improved quality of learning and a more efficient teaching process for the teachers.
The latter discussion about the different approaches to pedagogy and teacher professional development implies that policy makers also have a significant role in creating a successful learning system, in that they are the people who set references for teacher training programmes.
For instance, if they only train teachers while providing them with only the basic teaching materials, without ever allowing them to practice any form of independent thinking, the teachers produced will not be sufficiently competent. It is therefore, a delicate balancing act to maintain standards whilst also permitting teacher experimentation.
Because of this, teachers require scope to exercise a degree of autonomy to manoeuvre around the limited resources and their students’ eagerness for answers and therefore need utmost trust from the society. This is because the only eminent reason as to why the society is hesitant to give teachers any degree of autonomy is simply because they do not trust the teachers. With that taken into account, it is true to say that exercising autonomy for teachers to sustain such a manoeuvre starts with the attainment of trust from society.
The decision to resist or allow teachers to practice autonomy as a supporting principle within teacher professionalism, through grammar translation, audio-lingual, or communicative skills, is also discussed within English language pedagogy. Therefore, teachers are expected to act professionally towards selecting what is best for their students according to their language acquisition needs.