Abstract:
The study primarily represents the state of the teachers’ professional development in English Language
Teaching (ELT) at higher levels in a country where overall higher education has been passing through
a critical phase of development and reform since 2001. The study mainly evaluated the effectiveness of
the short-term courses of the ELTR Project Phase-1 for teachers’ professional development. These
courses were offered under the Faculty Development, Research and Publications, Testing and
Evaluation and the CALL sub-committees. The study was mainly carried out with the help of a
detailed questionnaire administered to the randomly selected 740 trainees, asking them about different
aspects of the courses. The researcher recorded semi-structured interviews from twenty resource
persons and five trainees each from CALL and EAP courses, during and after 6 months, to evaluate the
overall effectiveness of these courses for teachers’ professional development. The researcher recorded
semi-structured interviews from five heads of the English departments and from three HEC officials to
further probe into the effectiveness of these courses. The researcher applied Chi -Square test and also
observed and analyzed three available short courses on CALL, Research and Testing to cross-validate
the findings obtained through the questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. Finally, the researcher
analyzed sample documents like outlines of course modules and certain pertinent reports using Braun
and Clarke’s (2006) six phase model to see the effectiveness of the teachers’ professional courses and
concerned activities. The researcher found that teachers’ professional development courses were
effective to some extent as the trained teachers could improve upon their teaching methods and
increase and update their knowledge. However, the ELTR Project could have made these courses more
successful through ensuring need-based and merit-based selection, appointment of resource persons on
merit, provision of the same state-of-the-art facilities to the trainees at their workplaces as at the
training settings, and finally by making the resource persons accountable by at least informing them
(the trainees) that they would be followed up for internal or external evaluations. At the end, some
recommendations have been made for improving the teachers’ professional development courses and
for bringing in positive changes in terms of planning and implementation of future ELT Projects.
