Abstract:

Professional Development is a critical necessity in today’s educational environment. The present research was based on the idea that teachers are professionals and they need professional development consisting of various processes of ongoing growth. We examined university teachers’ attitude to professional development in a type of distance learning educational system in Iran and examined their attitudes with their counterparts teaching in on-campus educational systems. To this end, 70 Payame Noor EFL instructors and 70 non-Payame Noor EFL instructors from other public universities in Tehran, Iran were selected to conduct the research. A five-scale Likert questionnaire was designed and evaluated using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in order to determine to what extent PNU EFL instructors are involved in professional development and whether there is any significant difference between the level of professional development between them and non-PNU EFL instructors. Data were analyzed with SPSS 18.0 using both parametric and non-parametric statistical tests. The outcomes of this study identified that although PNU EFL teachers believed in increasing their professional development level, this belief wasn’t very prevalent and a significant difference occurred between the extent of professional development between them and non-PNU EFL instructors. Therefore, PNU EFL teachers need to develop a greater awareness of teaching in distance learning university systems while maintaining a high level of motivation to teach English in order to keep up with the changes of English language teaching in the world.

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