University language teachers as autonomous learners

The present empirical study investigates how university language
teachers approach their own professional development (PD) and which
forms their development can take. Research into teacher
professional development largely tends to concentrate on school
teachers, whereas in this study university language teachers are
the focus of interest. Furthermore, the role of teachers’ personal
contributions to their own professional learning is the main
concern of the study rather than which features of teacher
programmes might have a positive impact on teachers’ development.
The way the teachers proceed in accomplishing their PD task has
been documented through a Grounded Theory approach to data.
Questionnaries and follow-up semi-structured qualitative interviews
were used to explore the approaches of ten university language
teachers. Two professional profiles were identified and were named
the 'Learners' and the 'Developers' because they correspond to
Vygotsky’s (1978) distinction between learning and development and
because this best characterises the teachers' differences in this
study. The characteristics of the two profiles centre around their
awareness, the way they arrange their learning environment and
their attitudinal orientation. The teachers with a
“developer”-profile display a high capacity of ‘professional
self’-revision, have a highly developed awareness of their own
learning concerns and set long-term and demanding professional
goals that require them to go beyond routines. They maintain a
focused attention on their goals and on the various tasks to pursue
them, and are attentive to their positive emotional well-being as
teachers as well as to their cognitive needs. One critical result
is that they adopt and develop appropriate strategies that lead
them to their goals. As a consequence, they enter a cycle of change
and ultimately achieve their affective goals. The teachers with a
‘learner’-profile on the contrary are less attentive to all the
relevant dimensions involved in their own professional learning.
Contrary to the ‘developer’-colleagues, they lack the strategies
appropriate for them to realise their goals and to reduce the
complexity of the teacher development task. Their personal
contribution to their own development is limited, their learning
environment is consequently more secure, but less challenging than
for the previous profile, and requires less effort on their behalf.
Overall, they do not seem to be completely in charge of their own
learning and reproduced “traditional” learners’ behaviours. Their
attitudes towards their own professional development did not accord
with their lifelong learning goals. Their ‘professional self’ could
be more intensively developed. The present study aims to complement
the existing debate on language teachers’ professionalism and to
add new insights on the dynamic way in which teachers make sense of
their professional development. Based on the results, it is hoped
that a contribution will be made to bridging the gap between
research and practice by indicating how to augment existing
reflective tools, such as teachers’ portfolios, designed to sustain
reflection in language teachers and thus advance their professional
development.