Exploring The Relationship between Professional Development Attitudes, Activities and Self-Directed Learning Readiness of EFL Instructors

Abstract

With regards to gender, the research study aims to investigate the relationship between teachers' engagement in professional development activities, their attitudes towards professional development, and their readiness for self-directed learning. The study is designed in both correlation model and descriptive comparative model. The research sample is composed of 271 instructors of the English language working at state universities in Ankara. To collect the data, three questionnaires which are the scale of continuous professional development activities developed by De Vries et al. (2013), the attitude about professional development scale developed by Torff et al. (2005), and the self-directed learning readiness scale developed by Fisher et al. (2001) are used. SPSS 22 is used to analyze data and the results indicated that the level of participation of instructors in continuous professional development activities is not high. Besides, collaborative activities are the least preferred ones while reflective activities are the most preferred ones. The analysis of results also shows that the instructors have positive attitudes towards professional development while their attitudes did not differ significantly in terms of gender. Finally, it has been found that instructors’ levels of self-directedness are high and it does not differ significantly in terms of gender, the attitudes towards professional development activities, and self-directed learning readiness together exhibited a significant relationship with participation in all continuous professional development activities.