Filling in the Gap: Priorities for Designing In-Service English Language Teacher Training

This paper reports a part of on-going project on in-service training for English teachers, with a special attention on the prevailing discourses of ‘good’ in-service trainings for English language teachers provided by schools as well as educational boards in Japan.

This stage of the project, therefore, focuses on training providers. I will analyze various published documents on in-service teacher education programs offered by boards of education and other public agencies (cf. JACET 2022), and consider what content they believe is necessary to develop good teachers.

In my two preliminary studies based on questionnaire survey and follow up interviews conducted to English language teachers at primary and secondary schools in Japan with varying length of teaching experience suggested that teachers are actually influenced by their colleagues to form their own educational perspectives, while participation in various training programs is often mandatory. In other words, there is a lack of mutual understanding between what teachers need and what training providers believe teachers need

As an inter-rim measure of the project, it was found that training providers tends to pinpoint several key issues they believe important to many teachers, while the results of the interviews suggested that

As teachers gain experience, they will be able to handle even more diverse situations. Therefore, I will conclude the presentation by suggesting teacher training providers to design programs prioritizing to guide the teachers to be able to constantly reflect on their own teaching and encourage them to explore their repertories to make their teaching more distinctive while adoptable to different contexts.