Perceived Impact of Global Online Teacher Professional Development for English as a Foreign Language Educators of Young Learners
Abstract
This dissertation presents a research study that was conducted to understand the perceived impact of a global online teacher professional development (OTPD) program in the field of English language teaching (ELT), specifically for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) educators of young learners. In this case study, EFL teachers’ change/growth in knowledge, beliefs and instructional practices were examined based on their participation in an 8-week Teaching English to Young Learners (TEYL) Global Online Course between April to May 2020. This study also explored how these participating English language educators applied the course content to their local settings, despite the challenges especially in the midst of the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Primary data collected include two sets of semi-structured interviews, first in June 2020 to understand the perceived impact as soon as the course ended, as well as 12 weeks after in October 2020, in order to look for evidence of sustained learning from the course. Other data such as pre- and post-course assessments, online interactions through assignment posts, and voluntarily submitted artifacts such as demo teaching videos and images of student work samples were also collected and examined for analysis. Desimone’s (2009) core features for effective professional development model was used for etic analysis and emergent themes were sought through emic analysis to understand the TEYL OTPD participants’ experience and perceived impact. Findings from etic analysis indicated that the English language educators participating in this study perceived the presence of the core features of effective PD and reported on all aspects of the desired outcomes from TEYL OTPD. Expansion of Desimone’s (2009) model is proposed for the OTPD context, based on themes emerging from emic analysis. The emergent themes that led to the design elements for effective OTPD are: 1) scaffold the learning through online course organization; 2) provide rich and open education resources; 3) engage the learners through multimodal ways of learning; 4) promote active learning through modeling, reflection, and interaction; 5) achieve group cohesion from the start to build and sustain social presence; 6) take advantage of the scalable and quality asynchronous learning; 7) take an asset-based, democratic approach to collective participation; and 8) require the course developers to include cascading as an OTPD component. Practical and research implications have been drawn to inform the fields of OTPD and ELT.
Description
Keywords
COVID-19 pandemic, English Language Teaching, Global OTPD to local applications, Online Teacher Professional Development