On Primary And Secondary School English Teachers' Satisfaction With Training Program

Teachers play critical roles in coaching and guiding students through the learning process, nurturing students' interest and confidence as learners. Therefore, it's significant to reinforce teacher professional development (TPD), and many efforts are made towards this, such as various kinds of teacher training programs. Based on 2014 Summer English Teaching Training Program (SETTP) in Hu Nan province, this research aims at investigating teachers' satisfaction with SETTP. This research attempts to answer the following questions:1. Are the in-service English teachers of primary and secondary schools in Hu Nan Province satisfied with the Summer English Teacher Training Program in general?2. With what aspects are the in-service English teachers more satisfied and with what aspects are they less satisfied?3. What are the factors leading to teachers'less satisfaction?Guided by Richard West's (1994) framework of needs analysis in language teaching, the thesis takes three dimensions of needs analysis into consideration, which is wants, lacks, and necessities, to see in-service teachers'general satisfaction with the SETTP and the aspects with which they are more satisfied or with which they are less satisfied. Besides questionnaires on 84 in-service teachers who have attended the SETTP, a follow-up interview is carried out to find out the factors that lead to teachers'less satisfaction from five teachers of those whose questionnaires show a low satisfaction with the SETTP. The major findings and results show that:1) In general, in-service teachers agree that the SETTP is satisfying. However, a great percentage (39.78%) of those teachers still hold a neutral opinion on the SETTP, resulting the mean value of satisfaction is less than 4 points. Therefore, the SETTP still needs to be improved.2) From the perspective of teachers'needs, they are more satisfied with the aspect of wants, while they are less satisfied with the aspects of lacks and necessities.3) There are four main factors leading to teachers'less satisfaction. Firstly, there are some discrepancies between the purposes of the SETTP and the needs of the in-service teachers. Because of the easy design of teaching contents, the SETTP cannot satisfy teachers' needs of TPD in the context of English education in China. Secondly, the SETTP doesn't meet in-service teachers'special needs. For example, teachers want to experience a really western teaching classroom by imitative teaching or watching video, but the real teaching of SETTP is constrained on the teaching materials. Next, in-service teachers' own factors, such as their willingness and purposes to attend the SETTP, matter a lot. Lastly, the management of the SETTP leads to the teachers' less satisfaction, such as the arrangement of training time, the requirement of attending hours for continuing education scores, the quality of accommodation and food and the qualification of foreign teachers, etc.The findings indicate that teachers'satisfaction with some aspects of the SETTP is not so good and still some studies on teachers' needs should be done at the beginning of the SETTP. This thesis serves as a guide to future researchers who may testify the efficiency of in-service English teachers' training program in similar education contexts.