Turkish EFL Instructors’ Engagement in Professional Development

Abstract

While the beliefs and practices of teachers on professional development (PD) are generally considered topromote quality in education and raise teachers’ awareness regarding teaching strategies, there is stilllimited research available into different PD models’ effectiveness in providing teachers with practicalknowledge. This research aims to explore the role of AR in Turkish EFL instructors’ beliefs, and compareaction research (AR), as a transformative model, with transmissive and transitional PD models.Qualitative data collected by means of semi-structured in-depth interviews were analysed by usingconstant comparative data analysis procedure. The participants were nine Turkish EFL instructors froma state university, selected according to purposive criterion-based sampling. The results revealed that thePD beliefs of Turkish EFL instructors conducting AR were different from those engaging in transmissivePD models in terms of access to and reflection on knowledge. The beliefs of the former group indicatedstrong evidence of a lifelong learning PD process, collaboration-based PD practices with intrinsicmotivation, integration of inquiry based, experiential knowledge with reflective practice experiences, anda bottom up approach to PD. In contrast, the latter group showed short-term learning, and a theoreticalknowledge transmission model depending on extrinsic motivation, presenting non-reflective, passiveroles, with a top down approach. In this context, AR as an on-going PD activity is seen as highly effectivefor fostering teachers’ practical knowledge.© 2018 EJAL & the Authors. Published by Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (EJAL). This is an open-accessarticle distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND)(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).