A REVIEW ON THE EFFECTS OF A PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM ON EFL TEACHERS’ BELIEFS AND THEIR CLASSROOM PRACTICES

Abstract

This paper aims to review prior empirical studies concerning the effects of a professional development (PD) program on teachers’ beliefs about English language teaching  and their classroom teaching practices to raise the ignored and minimally addressed issues that could provide avenues for the future research in Vietnam. 20 published journal articles and dissertations were cautiously refined for “systematic reviews” that were employed as the only technique for a source of data in this inquiry. Findings from these studies indicated that teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and class teaching were found a development or a change in a wide range of studies, whereas no or little impact on teachers’ beliefs and their instructional practices as a result of teacher PD programs were uncovered in other research projects. Specially, most of the reviewed previous studies revealed certain limitations regarding research methodology, sample size, unnatural separation between teachers’ beliefs and their teaching practices, and relatively limited studies conducted in the field, particularly at secondary schools in the Vietnamese context.