Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Communicative Listening Activities: Exploring Frameworks for Listening Task Design

 

Communicative Listening Activities: Exploring Frameworks for Listening Task Design

 Handout and Resources

-Mark Cormier, 2025





Introduction: This blog contains content, activities, and support material for an interactive webinar given for Universidad Americana on May 29, 2025 as part of their Second International Symposium on Teaching English as a Foreign Language.  

Goals: 
  • Summarize key concepts in the teaching and learning of listening in a foreign language.
  • Consider more communicative alternatives to traditional listening comprehension questions. 
  • Explore a selection of communicative listening activities created with AI support. 

Guiding Questions: 
  • How do people learn to listen in a foreign language?
  • How can I design more communicative, student-centered listening activities?
  • How can generative AI tools help me develop engaging listening materials? 

Table of Contents

Click the links below to access the section of the blog you would like to see.















Topic 1: Theory Input - Key Concepts in Listening Instruction

Let's start by reviewing some important concepts about the role of listening in foreign language teaching and learning. 



Key Concept 1: Listening is the forgotten skill in language teaching and deserves more attention in the classroom. 


The Cinderella Skill: Many writers consider listening to be a neglected and underdeveloped skill in language teaching. Wilson (2008) says listening is "probably the least understood, the least researched and, historically, the least valued" (p. 17) skill, while Nunan (1999) refers to listening as "the Cinderella skill" because it is constantly "overlooked by its elder sister, speaking" (p. 199). There are many possible reasons for this. Like reading, listening has traditionally been considered by some to be a passive process, compared to the productive skills of speaking and writing. However, processing textual and auditory input is anything but passive. It is actually an extremely complex cognitive process that involves linguistic, semantic, and pragmatic elements and requires learners' active participation (Rost, 2016). 

Another possible reason for listening's lack of attention is its difficulty. Because it involves complex mental processes occuring inside the heads of learners which are invisible to teachers, it can be easy to subscribe to the false notion that listening is something that learners just have to figure out on their own and that there is very little a teacher can do to support its development. However, the truth is listening is like any other skill and dedicating time and attention to it in class aids in proficiency development. Listening deserves more attention in the classroom not just to bring it to the level of the other three skills, but because some argue that it is the most used language skill in real life with Morely (2001) estimating that "on average, we can expect to listen twice as much as we speak, four times more than we read, and five times more than we write" (p. 70). 







Key Concept 2: The four macro skills are not developed in isoloation, so it is good teaching practice to use activities that integrate the skills. 


Skills Working Together: Traditionally, foreign language pedagogy divides language competence into the four macro skills of reading, writing, speaking, and listening. This gives the false impression that the skills can be easily separated and taught in isolation. However, that is not how real language is used. It is helpful to consider how the four language skills actually interact and support each other in real communicative situations. ACTFL's World Readiness Standards framework (Cutshall, 2012) describes three communicative modes, contexts and purposes in which language is used to communicate. 

  • Interpersonal Communication: Learners interact and negotiate meaning in real-time to share information, reactions, feelings, and opinions. 
    • Skills Involved: Interpersonal communication involves a combination of listening and speaking in the case of oral interaction and reading and writing in the context of a text message chain.  

  • Interpretive Communication: Learners understand, interpret, and analyze messages on a variety of topics. 
    • Skills Involved: Interpretive communication involves listening or reading to make sense of spoken and written messages.  

  • Presentational Communication: Learners share information, concepts, and ideas to inform, explain, persuade, and narrate on a vareity of topics. 
    • Skills Involved: Although, the presentational mode involves one-way communication through speaking and writing, it is implied that the intended message will necessarily be interpreted by the target audience through listening or reading.  


Listening instruction is compatible with communicative language teaching when teachers design listening activities with the aim of helping learners focus on, comprehend, and respond to the meaning of the texts they hear. Compared to more traditional language teaching methods, the communicative approach has "more room for personal, emotional or critcial responses to the content, and less emphasis on drilling and repetition" (Wilson, 2008, p. 20). This meaning-focused approach to listening can be supported by through speaking, reading, and writing so teachers should see listening as an integral part of their lessons rather than an isolated skill. 






Key Concept 3: Listening is an active process. Learners construct the meaning of what they hear through a combination of top-down and bottom-up processing. It is an essential teaching practice to provide opportunities for learners to use both processing strategies by incorporating PRE-listening activities.   


Interactive Processing: Learners make use of both linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge in order to accurately process the meaning of messages they hear (Buck, 2001). The combination of bottom-up and top-down processing described below is known as interactive processing (Hegelsen, 2003). 
  • Bottom-Up Processing: We build understanding of what we hear by combining sounds to form words, words to form phrases, phrases to form sentences, etc. We use our knowledge of the language to make meaning of what we hear. 
  • Top-Down Processing: We use background knowledge to make logical inferences about what is happening and interpret what learners mean. We use knowledge of the world and context to make meaning. 
  • Adequate Comprehension Requires Both: When unfamiliar words, structures, or accents are encountered, we use knowledge of topic and context to infer meaning. When this knowledge is missing, we must rely more on our understanding of sounds, words, and sentences to construct meaning. It is important to do preparation activities (PRE-listening stage) before having students complete a listening task in order to:
    • Activate or build background knowledge and understanding of the context of the listening for students to apply top-down processing.
    • Review known vocab, grammar, and pronunciation features and/or pre-teach unknown elements that are essential to gain adequate understanding of the text in order to help students apply bottom-up processing. 






Key Concept 4: Checking listening comprehension requires a response from learners (physical, oral, or written). There are MANY ways to do this! The phrase "students listen and..." should feature prominently in your lesson plans and instructions for listening activities.


Show what they Know: Because listening comprehension is a mental process, teachers can only check that learners have adequately understood a text by eliciting a response from them. Listener responses come in two types:
  • Productive Responses: These include answering questions orally as well as "note-taking, writing answers to questions, correcting errors and completing tables, charts, diagrams and sentences" (Wilson, 2008, p. 81).
  • Recognition Response: These include "answering multiple-choice and true/false questions, ticking words and phrases that are heard, matching and choosing pictures" (p. 81).   
Always give your students a reason to listen. Quoting Gary Buck, Wilson (2008) says, "People never listen without a purpose, except perhaps in a language class" (p. 60). For each time you play the audio track, your students should be instructed to "listen and ..." perform some type of response. 
  • Listen and repeat
  • Listen and identify
  • Listen and point
  • Listen and select
  • Listen and write
  • Listen and move
  • And many other response possibilities that will be explored in the next section. 






Key Concept 5: Checking comprehension does not have to come at the end of the listening text. The WHILE-Listening stage of a listening lesson is critical and often overlooked. You can break the text up into multiple sections with small comprehension checks and processing tasks along the way.


Teaching not Testing: Teaching listening is not the same as testing listening. When we design listening activities, we need to incorporate listening response tasks that support understanding of the message and personal engagement with the text. Wilson (2008) says that effective listening activities: 
  • "Provide a focus, showing students what is important about any given passage;
  • Allow them to perceive the text's structure (causes and effects, problems and solutions, etc.)
  • Help them to 'chunk' the listening into sections or units of informatin;
  • Provide clues as to how they might respond;
  • Keep them concentrating throughout the passage;
  • Contribute towards the entertainment factor of the lesson by highlighting points of interest, irony, humour, etc." (p. 81).

Let's consider some ways teachers can do this!










Topic 2: Exploring Frameworks for Listening Instruction and Task Design

The long-established Pre-While-Post framework (Axbey, 1989) provides an excellent template for designing listening lessons. The primary aim of this blog post is to explore alternatives to traditional activities in the WHILE-listening stage, but it is important to review the purpose of each of the three stages first. 




Pre-While-Post Instructional Sequence 

  • Pre-Listening Activities: Engage students in activities to activate background knowledge about the topic of the audio and raise interest in the task to come. This builds contextual knowledge needed to apply top-down listening strategies. Review important vocab from the audio that students already know and “pre-teach” any unfamiliar terms to aid their bottom-up processing.
    • How: Questions, images, predictions, vocabulary review, make personal connections with the topic, etc. 

  • While-Listening Activities: Help students process the audio by breaking it down into manageable chunks in a variety of tasks to demonstrate their understanding of what they hear. Tasks should occur during the audio, not just at the end. Replay sections of the audio if needed, but always give students a task to complete.
    • How: See Lund's (1990) taxonomy of listener response types below.

  • Post-Listening Activities: Wrap up the cycle by checking and clarifying answers, reviewing difficult sections, asking students opinions about the audio, or doing a speaking or writing task inspired by the topic of the listening.
    • How: Check answers, help with misunderstandings, analyze languagein the text, audio also serves as stimulus for speaking or writing. 







Listening Response Types 

Teachers have many options when it comes to deciding how students will listen and respond to a text. Let's start by reviewing traditional types of comprehension questions before considering more student-centered and communicative alternatives. 

  • Traditional Response Types: Traditionally, students are asked to complete listening comprehension questions in a sequence that helps them identify information from general topic to specific details. Nunan (1999) provides a comprehensive list of typical questions:
    • Listen for Gist: Is the speaker talking about a family celebration or a work meeting? Is the podcast episode about sports or politics?
    • Listen for Purpose: Are the speakers making plans to travel or discussing a past trip? What is the speaker trying to do?
    • Listen for Main Idea: Why is the woman giving the man directions? What is the speaker's opinion about the movie?
    • Listen for Specific Information: What time does the bus leave tomorrow morning? How many guests are expected at the event? 
    • Listen for Inference: What can we guess about the man's relationship with his boss? What does the woman mean when she says, "Well, that's one way to handle it"?
    • Listen to Identify Attitude: Does the speaker sound enthusiastic or bored? Is the speaker being sincere or sarcastic?
    • Listen for Stress: Listen to how the man says, "I just bought the watch here yesterday". What sounds more important, where he bought the watch, or when?
    • Listen for Phonetic Distinctions: Did the man say "sheet" or "seat"?

  • Lund's Taxonomy: Randall Lund's (1990) taxonomy of listening response types includes answering traditional comprehension questions along with eight other alternatives which teachers can use to develop listening activities that engage learners and support their processing of the text. 
    • 1) Doing Activities: Require a physical response of some kind rather than a spoken or written one. For example, learners listen and point, sit or stand, move from one side of the room to another, perform gestures, raise thier hand or perform other actions based on what they hear. 
    • 2) Choosing Activities: Require selection from among alternatives. Examples include selecting the right pictures, objects, texts or actions; matching, placing pictures in the right order, or picking up objects according to description.
    • 3) Transferring Activities: Require learners to take information in one form and transfer it to another. Most of the time this involves drawing a picture or completing a graphic of some kind. Examples include making a map, tracing a route, completing a chart or table, or labeling a diagram. 
    • 4) Extending Activities: Require the listener to provide a text that goes beyond what is given. Examples include creating some kind of ‘finish’ to an incomplete story, solving a problem, and filling in missing lines of dialogue.
    • 5) Duplicating Activities: Require the learners to replicate all or part of the message, either verbatim in the L2 or as a translation in the L1. Examples include repeating the exact message orally or in writing in either the L2 or a translation in the L1.
    • 6) Condensing Activities: Require the listener to represent the message in a reduced form. Examples include completing outlines, notes, bullet points, oral or written summaries.
    • 7) Modeling Activities: Require the listener to use the text as a model for imitation or for another action. For example, parts of the audio are used for a pronunciation lesson or the audio models a similar speaking activity to come.
    • 8) Conversing Activities: Require the listener to have an interactive exchange with the teacher or peers about the content of the audio. Examples include giving opinions about the topic, story, characters, or ideas in the audio.
    • 9) Answering Activities: Require the listener to answer traditional true/false, multiple choice, or short answer questions about gist, main idea, purpose, specific details, inference, and other aspects of the text.  








Topic 3: Sample Listening Activities Created with AI Support

Merging Lund's Taxonomy with AI Supported Materials Development: Until very recently, teachers' choice of audios to include in a listening lesson was limited to audio tracts from the textbook, authentic materials, homemade recordings, and in-class dictations. Now, with the advent of generative AI tools, it is easy for teachers to write audio scripts that better fit their learners' needs and interests and they can easily utilize online text-to-speech tools to generate lifelike audio recordings.  The following sample activities include scripts, recordings, images, and response tasks that were developed with AI support. 

Note: The following sample activities only show the WHILE (and some POST) stages of the listening lesson and do not indicate what teachers and students can do to prepare learners to engage with the  audio. 


Sample 1 - Office Mystery


Materials and Procedure: Students access the worksheet below. The teacher plays the audio in sections giving the students instructions about what they must do in the next panel before playing the audio. 
    • Audio 1: CLICK HERE - Listen and circle Jake's lunch.
    • Audio 2: CLICK HERE - Listen and draw the map to trace Jakes's steps.
    • Audio 3: CLICK HERE - Listen and copy the question Lucy asked.
    • Audio 4: CLICK HERE - Listen and perform the actions and emotions.
    • Audio 5: CLICK HERE - Listen and complete the summary
    • Audio 6: CLICK HERE - Listen and continue the story.

Comentary: This audio is rather long but it is broken into manageable chunks with specific learner response tasks for each section. It shows a variety of Lund's listening response types including: choosing, transfering, duplicating, doing, condensing, and extending. For Audio 4, the teacher selects two students to be actors. They must carry out the actions while expressing the emotions listed on the worksheet as they listen to the track. Their classmates will decide who the better actor is. 

Tools: The audio script, listening tasks, and images were created with ChaptGPT. The audio was generated using Microsoft Clipchamp's text-to-speech tool. 








Sample 2 - Teenage Dilemmas



Materials and Procedure: Students access the worksheet below. The teacher plays the audio the first time and students listen to three teenagers describing a problem they are facing. For each speaker, students need to identify key details by drawing a line between the speaker and images. Not all images will be relevant. Then they discuss their choices with a partner. In the second listening students complete a chart by putting a checkmark next to any people mentioned by each speaker. For the thrid and final listening, students articulate the speakers' dilemmas using simple phrases, and put a check next to what they think the speaker should do next. Then they discuss their choices with a partner. They finish by chosing one of the characters and improvising a brief roleplay exploring what might happen next in the story.

Comentary: The audio is long but broken into three segments that the teacher can easily pause between to allow students to think and process the information. The worksheet requires the students to listen to the audio multiple times, each for a different purpose and a number of Lund's response ideas are included: choosing, transferring, condensing, conversing, and extending. Tasks one and two make use of pictures that represent key details from the audio but it is up to students to interpret what these images represent which encourages more personal engagement with the task.

Tools: The audio scripts and tasks one, two, and three were written by the author. The images in task one were sourced from www.flaticon.com. The voices were produced using Google Gemini and ChatGPT conversation function and the roleplay cards in task four were created using ChatGPT.  







Sample 3 - Daily Routines, Habits, and Eating Preferences



Materials and Procedure: Students access the worksheet below. The teacher plays the three audios and students are asked to identify the speaker of each audio by matching them with a picture. They should also be encouraged to recall as many details about each person as they can. Then the teacher plays the audios again and students take keyword notes in the table. After each track, students can compare their responses with the person sitting near them. The tracks can be played one more time if needed before students complete tasks three and four in which they analyze and respond to the ideas mentioned by the speaker before creating a similar text about themselves using a narrative frame. 

Comentary: This worksheet makes use of a very useful technique called guided note taking which is a combination of Lund's transfering and condensing response types. The note taking table identifies specific information learners must find and includes short phrases to help them write the required details. Each audio script follows a similar structure and students are required to extract the same information. Once they complete the note taking table, they can refer to the information there in order to complete the personal response in task three and the audios serve as a kind of model for students to describe their own habits and routines in task four.

Tools: The audio scripts, character images, and discussion questions were created using ChatGPT. The notetaking table in task two and narrative frame in task four were created by the author. The audios were generated using the text-to-speech feature at luvvoice.com.  








Sample 4 - Animal Behaviors



Materials and Procedure: Students access the worksheet below. The teacher plays the audio the first time and students identify the animals and the order they were mentioned by drawing a line between each picture and the numbers in the chart. Then the teacher assigns each student two numbers at random. On the second listening, students have to take keyword notes to complete the chart about their two assigned animals. The teacher can play the track a third time if needed. Then students are put in small groups. First they help their partners complete the missing information from their chart and then they discuss the questions. 

Comentary: This worksheet includes a variation of the note taking response strategy mixed with a jigsaw listening task in which students are only responsible for taking notes about portions of the audio. After listening, students complete a speaking task in which they help each other complete the missing portions of their table. The audios also serve as a model for the students' description of an additional animal in task three.

Tools: The audio scripts and images were created with ChatGPT. The audio was generated with Microsoft's Clipchamp text-to-speech tool and the table and task instructions were written by the author.









Topic 4: Employment Opportunity and Free Professional Development Resources 

I work at Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano where we are always looking for new teachers to join the team. In addition, I help organize three free professional development initiatives that I encourage you to take advantage of. 





Great Place to Work
CLICK HERE to learn more about the benefits and requirements of being an English teacher at CCCN and start your application. 






PD Talks: Professional Development Sessions
CLICK HERE to register for the talk Decolonizing the Curriculum: Empowering Educators to Center Students' Voices and Experiences by Yuliana Brenes on May 30. PD Talks is a free monthly webinar series for English teachers organized by Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano and hosted by me. Usually held on the last Friday of the month from 3:00 to 5:00 pm, these sessions consist of a 90 minute online workshop with breakout room tasks which allow you to meet and interact with other teachers from around the world. In 2024 alone, teachers from 62 countries connected to our 12 talks. All attendees receive a personalized virtual certificate of participation and badge. 






NCTE 2025 - July 8-11
CLICK HERE to visit the website of the 40th National Conference for Teachers of English Costa Rica "Transforming Lives in ELT: AI Integration with Human-Centered Innovation". NCTE is an annual event that brings together language teachers from around the country and beyond. For the last five years, NCTE has had a free online component with the option to connect to twelve professional development webinars. 







Join the CoP
We also have a private website called CCCN's Community of Practice which hosts our Teacher Development Video Library, a collection of over 160 video recording of talks and workshops from NCTE, PD Talks, and other professional develpment events over the past five years. They are organized into categories to help you find something relevant to you. All of the resources are free but you must register to access the site. CLICK HERE to create your profile. 











References:

Axbey, S. (1989). ‘Standard exercises in self-access learning’. Presentation at British Council course on self-access learning, Cambridge, May 1989.

Buck, G. (2001). Assessing Listening. Cambridge University Press.

Cutshall, S. (2012). More Than a Decade of Standards: Integrating “Communication” in Your Language Instruction. The Language Educator. American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

Helgesen, M. (2003). Listening. In D. Nunan (Ed.), Practical English Language Teaching (pp. 23-46). McGraw Hill.

Lund, R. J. (1990). A taxonomy for teaching second language listening. Foreign Language Annals, 23. 105-115.

Morley, J. (2001). Aural comprehension instruction: Principles and practices. In M. Celce-Murcia (Ed.), Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (pp. 69-85). Heinle Cengage.

Nunan, D. (1999). Second Language Teaching & Learning. Heinle & Heinle.

Rost, M. (2016). Teaching and Researching Listening (3rd ed.). Routledge.

Wilson, J.J. (2008). How to Teach Listening. Pearson Education Limited.











Session Details and Author Information

Session Title: Communicative Listening Activities: Exploring Frameworks for Listening Task Design

Session Abstract: Listening is an essential language skill that supports learners’ ability to engage in real-world communication, but it also comes with its own set of challenges for both teachers and learners. The well-established Pre-While-Post instructional framework for receptive skills (Axbey, 1989) provides a powerful guide for sequencing listening lessons, but teachers often find it difficult to design appropriate activities in the “While-Listening” stage that genuinely support skill development rather than simply test comprehension. This talk will explore Lund’s (1990) taxonomy of listening response types, a helpful resource for designing listening tasks that are focused on communication and skill-building rather than assessment. Participants will engage in demonstration activities to better understand the framework and will leave with practical ideas for implementing it in their own classrooms, including strategies for generating listening tasks with AI support.

Keywords: Listening Instruction, Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), Artificial Intelligence

Author: Mark Foster Cormier

Author Bio: Mark Foster Cormier is an English teacher and teacher educator who is passionate about materials development, reflective practice, and professional development in ELT. He earned a master of arts in TESOL from Marlboro College and bachelor’s degrees in English teaching and Latin American studies from Universidad Americana and Appalachian State University. Mark has been an EFL teacher in Costa Rica for 16 years and has specialized in teacher development for over a decade. He currently works as Head of Training and Professional Development at Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano where he is in charge of new teacher recruiting and training, planning ongoing professional development initiatives, and hosting the monthly webinar series for language teachers called PD Talks: Professional Development Sessions. Click here to connect with Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-cormier-elt/
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Sunday, May 4, 2025

Don't Stop Now: Professional Development Opportunities for Early Career Teachers

Don't Stop Now: Professional Development Opportunities for Early Career Teachers

 Handout and Resources

-Mark Cormier, 2025





Introduction: This blog contains content, activities, and support material for a two-hour interactive workshop given at Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica Campus Coto on May 8, 2025 as part of their Didactics Seminar 2025 - Innovation and Technology in English Teaching event. 

Goals: 
  • Describe the importance of professional development for early career English teachers.
  • Summarize key concepts in professional learning and teacher development.
  • Explore a selection of innovative professional development opportunities using AI and free online resources.

Guiding Questions: 
  • What are the learning challenges and opportunities for English teachers in the first years of their career?
  • How do teachers learn and develop throughout their careers?
  • How can I use AI tools and tasks to engage in professional development? 

Table of Contents

Click the links below to access the section of the blog you would like to see.










Topic 1: Warm Up - My Ideal Future Self

Before we explore what professional development means and strategies you can use, let's do a little warm up. Try to imagine two English teachers. They both graduated from the same university and they have been working for nearly twenty years at the same school. However, they have very different profiles. 
  • Teacher Jennifer: Jennifer is your role model and the best teacher you have ever had in any subject, not just English. She goes above and beyond anyone's expectations and you hope that some day you can be half the teacher Jennifer is when you start working.  
  • Teacher Johnny: Johnny is nobody's favorite teacher. He's not the worst teacher in the world and he's not going to be fired for misbehavior, but he only does the bare minimum to keep his job year after year. There are a lot of aspects of Johnny's way of teaching that you hope you never do when you start working. 

CLICK HERE to access the activity in a new tab. 












Topic 2: Theory Input - The What, Why, and How of Professional Development

Let's start by reviewing some important concepts about professional development in the field of language teaching.



What is Challenging about being a New Teacher?

Starting is the Hard Part: Starting your teaching journey is a scary and challenging experience. Crandall and Christison say, "the first years of teaching are the most intense and anxiety-producing time for teachers, as they transition from student to teacher and try to balance the need to continue learning how to teach with the need to be perceived as a 'real' teacher" (2016, p. 9). Early career teachers are not just struggling to become familiar with the curriculum and develop practical teaching strategies, they are also trying to figure out who they are and who they should be. Farrell (2009) says, "Essentially novice teachers are developing conceptions of 'self-as-teacher', they are formulating teacher identities related to institutional, personal, and professional conceptions of the role of the novice teacher" (p. 183).

Because of these challenges, the first years of a teacher's career are the most critical for future success. Studies of teacher career attrition, leaving teaching to work in another field, show that the first five years have the highest rates of dropouts with 40%-50% of teachers leaving the profession before reaching year six in North America (Crandall & Christison, 2016). It is essential that new teachers fully embrace their professional identity as teachers and develop a healthy mindset and a genuine curiosity and openness to new experiences that will power their professional growth and development. Receiving your college diploma is an acheivement worth celebrating. However, "completing an academic program is really only the beginning of a lifelong quest to better understand our students, ourselves, our discipline, and the approaches and techniques we can use to help others become competent users of English" (Crandall & Miller, 2014, p. 631). 



What is Professional Development?

Defining our Terms: Professional development according to Rossner (2017) is "the professional growth that teachers achieve in the process of gaining experience and knowledge and reflecting on their teaching" (p. 169). This growth can come from fomal academic programs, workshops and trainings in a workplace setting, and through the individual teacher's process of ongoing exploration, experimentation, and reflection.  







CCCN's Professional Development Model

Purpose and Design: To explore some theortical foundations of professional development for language teachers, we will use CCCN's Professional Development Model (Cormier, 2023), a framework I wrote to describe the philosophical underpinnings that guide the work we do to develop teachers at Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano. The model is represented visually with the graphic above as a series of nested triangles. At the center of the model is the individual teacher who is an active participant in his or her personal trajectory of ongoing development influenced by a unique combination of beliefs, experiences, interests, and motivations. The teacher is connected on each side to the three theoretical pillars of our professional development model which ground the work we do in concepts from the academic literature of our field: professionalism in ELT, teacher learning, and Communities of Practice. The outer level represents three institutional areas of support, which we will not discuss in this session.



Why is Professional Development a Teacher-Centered Process?

Teachers as Participants: Like the students they serve, teachers are not passive participants in their learning process and there are several important factors that are unique to each individual teacher that must be accounted for: 
  • Beliefs and Values: All teachers, whether they have articulated them or not, have a set of assumptions, beliefs, and principles that make up what Brookfield (2006) calls their “working philosophy of practice” (p. 254). A successful professional development model must acknowledge teachers’ philosophy of practice and encourage them to explore the degree to which their actions are in alignment with their beliefs.
  • Interests, Motivations, and Goals: Teachers differ in their interests within the field of English language teaching, their teaching styles, preferred techniques and resources, and other important aspects. In addition, their short and long-term goals and aspects they find motivating about their job influence their thinking and decision making. Naturally, this diversity means that teachers are drawn to explore different types of classroom issues and they reflect on teaching experiences from their own unique perspective.
  • Personal and Professional Identities: Throughout their careers teachers are in a continuous process of identity construction that involves a complex interplay between their past experiences, present contexts, and relationships with others. Teaching and teacher development are deeply personal activitities because, in Palmer’s terms, “we teach who we are” (1997, p. 17).
  • Individual Developmental Trajectory: Teachers learn in different ways, at different speeds, and they are driven by different needs. As Borg (2003) points out, “individual teachers make sense of and are affected by training programmes in different and unique ways” (p. 91). There is no doubt that professional development is an individual process. 


What is Professionalism in ELT?

Defining Professionalism: Teachers demonstrate professionalism by acting in responsible and ethical ways and by carrying out our professional duties to the best of their abilities (Rossner, 2017). Penny Ur (2002) provides a helpful way of understanding the features of language teacher professionalism by differentiating ourselves from four groups of non-professionals:
  • Laypeople: A layperson is a member of the general public who does not have the knowledge, skills, vocabulary, and other markers of belonging to a specialized professional group. English language teachers by contrast are a distinct professional community with a shared knowledge base and domain-specific terminology, methodology, theories, professional organizations, and academic publications. We are professionals, NOT laypeople.
  • Amateurs: An amateur is someone who engages in an activity without the necessary credentials and who is not held to the same standards of quality and commitment as a professional. Professional English teachers are committed to upholding our professional standards and responsibilities and we have dedicated ourselves to years of preparation and academic achievement. We are professionals, NOT amateurs.
  • Technicians: A technician is a skilled worker who is able to perform a task well through repetition and practice over time but who lacks the autonomy and deeper understanding needed to operate independently. Professionals not only perform skillful actions, but they are able to make decisions about the course of action they want to take based on a set of guiding principles and careful analysis of dynamic contextual factors rather than following a pre-established recipe. We are professionals, NOT technicians.
  • Academics: An academic is someone focused on research, knowledge construction, and theory building who is not so concerned with the immediate real-world application of their thinking. Professionals, by contrast, are focused on finding what works and their main concern is making an impact in the world through their actions. We make use of knowledge generated through research if it makes sense to us and works in our teaching context. We search for answers to our own problems through active experimentation in the classroom and reflection on the results of our actions. We are professionals, NOT academics.



How do Teachers Develop over Time?

Teaching and Decision Making:  In many ways, the essence of teaching is the combination of decisions we make in preparation for a teaching experience, ones we make while engaged in the teaching experience, and ones we make after reflecting on the teaching experience; but, how do teachers make these decisions? Freeman (1989) proposes that teacher decision making is based on the interplay between four elements which he abbreviates with the acronym KASA: knowledge, attitudes, skills, and awareness.
  • Knowledge: Our understanding of the subject matter; the students and their backgrounds, proficiency level, and learning styles; and “the sociocultural, institutional, and situational contexts” (p. 31) of the teaching-learning process.
  • Attitudes: The thoughts, beliefs, and feelings we have about ourselves, the activity of teaching, and the learners we interact with.
  • Skills: The actions we need to perform including strategies for presenting content, giving instructions, providing feedback, managing classroom interaction, and many others.
  • Awareness: Our “capacity to recognize and monitor the attention [we] are giving or [have] given to something” (p. 33). Crucially, this includes our awareness of our strengths and limitations in the first three areas of the KASA model: our knowledge, attitudes, and skills.

Better Teaching is Better Decision Making: Improvements in teaching are the result of improvements in our decision making capacity through expansion and changes in our KASA. With that in mind,  professional learning and development can be viewed as the ongoing process of:
  • Expanding our knowledge about topics like the English language, second language acquisition, language teaching pedagogy, the needs of our students, and the details of our curriculum.
  • Developing healthier attitudes about factors such as our professional identities, our teaching roles and responsibilities, the educational philosophy of the institution, our students; and their personalities, needs, and interests.
  • Improving our current skills and acquiring new abilities in areas such as planning, communicating, assessing, providing feedback, using resources and technology, time management, and organization.
  • Becoming more sensitive in our awareness of our thinking, decision making, emotions and attitudes, strengths and areas for growth, and, most importantly, our actions and the results they achieve.


How can Teachers Gain Awareness?

Reflective Practice: Continual refining one's awareness should be the primary aim of a teacher's professional development and the cultivation of a personal reflective practice is the only way to achieve it. In a broad sense, reflective practice is "mental activity that teachers do as they think in teaching situations" (Freeman, 2016, p. 207). Although, there is no single agreed upon definition, reflection is usually considered to involve the following elements:
  • It is systematic thinking that involves questioning our assumptions in order to make informed decisions and avoid having our teaching be “guided mostly by impulse, tradition, and/or authority” (Farrell, 2022, p. 4).
  • It involves problem solving. One of the characteristics of professional expertise in teaching is “being able to think critically about experience, to identify problems … in order to identify possible solutions, and to formulate these as a plan of action” (Thornbury, 2006, p. 194).
  • It can occur in different moments and for different purposes. Reflection-on-action is the process of retrospectively analyzing a teaching experience that already occurred in order to gain insight. Reflection-in-action is the process of actively attending to what you are doing while you teach to increase your awareness of how you react to situations and make decisions in real time. Finally, reflection-for-action is the proactive process of reflecting before teaching in order to “anticipate what may happen and try to account for this before [we] conduct the lesson” (Farrell, 2022, p. 22).



How do Teachers Develop through Interactions with other Teachers?

Communities of Practice: One of the most powerful drivers of teacher development comes from our fellow teachers. We learn to be better educators by watching what other teachers do, by sharing stories of challenges and success, by motivating each other to overcome frustrations, and by engaging in collaborative inquiry. A Community of Practice (CoP) is a social learning concept described by Wenger-Trayner (2015) as “groups of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” Members of a CoP are practitioners, not merely people with similar interests. This means that they are actively engaged in their field and “develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, and ways of addressing recurring problems" (p. 2). In a CoP the knowledge and insight that individual teachers have gained through experimentation, problem solving, and reflection on experience become collective resources for the community.









Topic 3: Exploring Frameworks for Reflective Practice

The ways that teachers process their experiences in the classroom can be greatly enhanced by following frameworks for reflection from the academic literature. Here are three popular frameworks (Farrell, 2019). Click one of the links, observe the diagram, and read the explanation. Be ready to explain the following to someone sitting close to you:
  • Who came up with this model?
  • How does the model work?
  • What do I think about it?









Topic 4: Innovative Strategies to Engage in Professional Development

Ways to Engage: Teaching, especially in the early career stage, is very time consuming. As Rossner rightly points out, "once a teacher has taken on a teaching position (or more than one) there is little time available for further on-the-job training and even less for other kinds of professional development" (2017, p. 7). However, there are still plenty of options and it is up to the individual teacher to seek out and take advantage of these opportunities. In keeping with the theme of this conference, here are several innovative professional development strategies that leverage emerging generative AI tools to help teachers engage in reflective practice.


AI Supported Professional Development Opportunities



Reading and Viewing Guides for Articles and Webinars
As a professional language teacher, it is important that you develop the ability to engage with the academic literature of your field. However, it can be challenging to do as an early career teacher because of unfamiliarity with the concepts addressed, the language used, and the technical format of academic writing. AI can help with this by taking on the role of a teacher who designs lesson sequences and support material to help you process and get the most out of articles and YouTube webinars. The prompt I designed instructs the AI to generate three activities for you to complete before, while, and after you engage with a text:
  • Before: An outline of the main points of the text and some initial reflection questions to prepare for what you will encounter.
  • While: A reading or viewing guide with periodic reflection breaks and comprehension checks.
  • After: A series of reflective prompts for you to respond in writing that ask you to express a personal reaction to the ideas of the text and explore their applications in your teaching.

  • Prompt for Articles: Go to ChatGPT or Gemini and upload the PDF of the article you want to read. Then copy/paste the three parts of the prompt into the AI one at a time. Allow the AI to generate the content before entering the next prompt or you may overload the system.

    • Prompt 1
    The user teaches English as a foreign language in Costa Rica and will read an academic text as a professional development strategy. Your role is to create support material following a three stage activity sequence that will help the user process the information they read. Generate a brief description and bulleted outline of the main content contained in the text that the user can skim before reading. Below that include 2-5 reflection questions to help the user begin to think about some of the ideas they will encounter. Be sure the questions do not require specialized knowledge that can not be answered without having read the text first. Title this section Before Reading - Preparing to Learn. When this prompt is entered, you will acknowledge that you have analyzed and understood the user’s request. If the user has not uploaded the file of the text, request it before generating the content.

    Prompt 2
    Generate a worksheet that will help the user pay attention to the key ideas of the text. Include page numbers for each major section and two response tasks for the user at the end of each section. The first is called Comprehension Check with 2-3 quiz items and the second is called Reflective Break with 2-3 open-ended questions that help the user express their thoughts about the content. Title this section While Reading - Reading Guide.

    Prompt 3
    Generate 3-5 open-ended writing prompts to help the user express thoughts about the reading contents, possible classroom application of ideas, and new things the user may want to explore as a result of reading the text. Divide the task into two sections called "So what?" with prompts for personal reflection and "Now what?" with prompts about application and further exploration. Title this section After Reading - Reflective Journaling

  • Prompt for Webinars: Go to Gemini (does not work with ChatGPT) and paste the YouTube link to the webinar you want to watch. Then copy/paste the three parts of the prompt into the AI one at a time. Allow the AI to generate the content before entering the next prompt or you may overload the system. This prompt is less stable that the one for articles you may need play with it a bit. 

    • Prompt 1
    The user teaches English as a foreign language in Costa Rica and will watch a recording of a teaching webinar on YouTube as a professional development strategy. Your role is to create support material following a three stage activity sequence that will help the user process the information they see. Generate a brief description and bulleted outline of the main content contained in the video recording that the user can read before they watch. Below that include 2-5 reflection questions to help the user begin to think about some of the ideas they will encounter. Be sure the questions do not require specialized knowledge that can’t be answered without having seen the video first. Title this section Before Watching - Preparing to Learn. When this prompt is entered, you will acknowledge that you have analyzed and understood the user’s request. If the user has not shared the link to the YouTube video, request it before generating the content.

    Prompt 2
    Generate a worksheet that will help the user pay attention to the key ideas of the recording. Include timestamps for each major section and two response tasks for the user at the end of each section. The first is called Comprehension Check with 2-3 quiz items and the second is called Reflective Break with 2-3 open-ended questions that help the user express their thoughts about the content. Title this section While Watching - Viewing Guide.

    Prompt 3
    Generate 3-5 open-ended writing prompts to help the user express thoughts about the video contents, possible classroom application of ideas, and new things the user may want to explore as a result of watching the video. Divide the task into two sections called "So what?" with prompts for personal reflection and "Now what?" with prompts about application and further exploration. Title this section After Watching - Reflective Journaling.






Academic Conversation Partner
Another way to explore and consolidate your understanding of the concepts of a reading is to have a conversation with an AI discussion partner. In this case, the AI takes on the role of a Vygoskian More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) (McLeod, 2024) who prompts you with open-ended questions that require you to restate key ideas from the text in your own words and express your thoughts about them. The AI is instructed to acknowledge and expand on your ideas and help clarify misunderstandings that you may have about the content. You can interact with the AI in writing or use the conversation feature of either ChatGPT or Gemini to have a spoken conversation.

  • Prompt: Go to ChatGPT or Gemini and upload the PDF of the article you want to read and discuss. Then copy/paste the following prompt:

    • Task Specifications
    The user teaches English as a foreign language in Costa Rica and will have a conversation with the AI about the contents of an academic text. Your role is that of a Vygostsian More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) who will converse with the user about the main ideas of the text. Ask 3-5 open ended questions about the content of the text that allow the user to articulate their understanding and opinions of key ideas. Allow the user to respond before asking the next question. Acknowledge the user’s responses, expand and add additional details, and clarify if it seems there have been any misunderstandings. Ask if the user would like to explore that topic more deeply or move on to the next question. Keep your tone friendly and helpful and use simple language to make the academic content more accessible to the user.

    Initial LLM Response
    When this prompt is entered, you will greet the user and acknowledge that you have analyzed and understood the user’s request. If the user did not upload a file with the text, request the file before beginning.
 




Gemini's Audio Overview
Google’s Gemini AI has a feature called Audio Overview that creates a 5-7 minute podcast with a very realistic conversation between two people discussing the main concepts of any document you upload. It is a very helpful way to consolidate understanding of main ideas. However, it works best if you have actually ready and attempted to understand the text on your own first in my opinion.
  • Example: CLICK HERE to hear a podcast discussing the Penny Ur (2001) article about professionalism in ELT. 


How: After uploading a text file to Gemini, you will see an option above the file that says Generate Audio Overview. Click it and wait a few minutes for the system to generate the file. CLICK HERE for detailed instructions from Google. 





Critical Friend Reflection Partner
One way to reflect on and analyze the teaching experiences you have is to engage in deep conversation with a trusted partner who can help you explore critical moments in your lesson, your thoughts and feelings, and future possibilities. AI can serve the role of your critical friend by asking you guiding questions, reacting to your experiences, making suggestions, and summarizing the key ideas that came up in the conversation that you want to remember. The examples follow two reflection cycles from the professional literature, Gibb’s (1988) reflection cycle (description, feelings, evaluation, analysis, conclusion, and action plan) and Borton’s (1970) developmental framework (what, so what, now what). You can interact with the AI by typing or using the conversation feature. I personally prefer writing since it gives me more time to think about the responses I give.

  • Critical Friend Prompt - Borton's Cycle: Go to ChatGPT or Gemini and copy/paste the following prompt:



    Task Specifications
    The user teaches English as a foreign language in Costa Rica and will have a conversation with the AI to reflect on a recent teaching experience. Your role is a critical friend, an experienced foreign language teacher with a critical mindset, who will help the user process the lesson experience following Borton’s three stage reflection cycle outlined in the Format Specifications below.

    Format Specifications
    1. What?: The focus here is generating a vivid description of the events that occurred. 
    2. So What?: The focus here is analyzing the experience by exploring thoughts and feelings and identifying any puzzling aspects of the lesson or things that went well.
    3. Now What?: The focus here is action-oriented by exploring things that can be tried in future lessons based on the lesson experience.

    Interaction Specifications
    Use Borton’s cycle to ask the user questions about their recent teaching experience. Follow the order of the cycle and adapt the specific questions you ask based on the user responses. Make the conversation seem natural and without showing the order of the cycle or making explicit reference to Borton or the names of the stages of the cycle with the user. For each user response, acknowledge the ideas they mentioned and react to them as an experienced colleague acting as a critical friend would. This means asking one or two follow questions to expand on the user’s ideas before moving to the following stage. At the end of the interaction, provide a summary of the user’s reflections and a few bulleted suggestions based on all the interactions.




  • Critical Friend Prompt - Gibbs's Cycle: Go to ChatGPT or Gemini and copy/paste the following prompt:

    • Task Specifications
    The user teaches English as a foreign language in Costa Rica and will have a conversation with the AI to reflect on a recent teaching experience. Your role is a critical friend, an experienced foreign language teacher with a critical mindset, who will help the user process the lesson experience following Gibb’s six stage reflection cycle outlined in the Format Specifications below.

    Format Specifications
    1. Description: What happened? Focus on factual details of the situation, including who was involved, what actions were taken, and the outcome.
    2. Feelings: What were your thoughts and emotions during and after the experience. Be honest and explore your reactions, both positive and negative.
    3. Evaluation: What was good and bad about the experience? Consider the strengths and weaknesses, and make value judgements based on the situation.
    4. Analysis: What sense can you make of the situation? Draw on theories, experiences, and other perspectives to understand the events and their implications.
    5. Conclusion: What have you learned from the experience? What could you have done differently? Summarize your learning and identify areas for improvement.
    6. Action Plan: What will you do differently in the future? Outline specific steps and strategies you can use for similar situations in the future.

    Interaction Specifications
    Use Gibb’s cycle to ask the user questions about their recent teaching experience. Follow the order of the cycle and adapt the specific questions you ask based on the user responses. Make the conversation seem natural and without showing the order of the cycle or making explicit reference to Gibb or the names of the stages of the cycle with the user. For each user response, acknowledge the ideas they mentioned and react to them as an experienced colleague acting as a critical friend would do before asking them the next questions. At the end of the interaction, provide a summary of the user’s reflections and a few bulleted suggestions based on all the interactions.







Interactive Reflective Journaling
Journaling is an excellent, low-tech strategy to engage in professional development and reflective practice. It involves periodically writing about your experiences in the classroom to describe your thoughts, feelings, doubts, failures, and triumphs. Keeping a journal over time helps you track your professional learning journey as you experiment with different teaching strategies and document the results. I have personally found journaling to help me stay motivated and focused on my professional development.

Tips: Write in the language that you are most comfortable in expressing yourself. English, Spanish, a mix? It’s up to you! Be consistent with your writing by choosing a specific day and time that you will dedicate to journaling each week. It can be 20 minutes or as long as you want but establish and maintain your routine. Finally, create a framework to organize your responses. I have found that answering these three questions works well for me:
  • Describe what happened in the class with as many details as possible.
  • Write your thoughts and feelings about anything interesting, unexpected, frustrating, or unusual that happened.
  • What do I want to remember from this class or think more about in the future?

  • How: You can simply save your transcripts from any conversations you have with an AI Critical Friend as a kind of journal or you can copy/paste the prompt below in an AI and try it yourself.

    • Task Specifications
    You are an AI assistant that helps the user complete an Interactive Reflective Journal entry. An Interactive Reflective Journal is a professional development activity for English language teachers in which they write answers to questions in order to describe and explore aspects of a recent teaching experience.

    Format Specifications
    The final version of the Interactive Reflective Journal Entry is a single text with the title Reflective Journal Entry along with the date of publication. The body of the texts is divided into three sections. The first is a Description of the Teaching Experience. The second is an Analysis of the Teaching Experience. The third is called Moving Forward. The user must provide the content for the three sections. These are listed in the Content Specifications below.

    Content Specifications
    The following specifications must be provided by the user.
    1. Describe what happened in your class with as many details as possible.
    2. Write your thoughts and feelings about anything interesting, unexpected, frustrating, or unusual that happened.
    3. What do I want to remember from this class or think more about in the future?

    Initial LLM Response
    When this prompt is entered, you will greet the user and acknowledge that you have analyzed and understood the user’s request and you will solicit from the user the three content specifications you need to fulfill the request. Ask the user to provide one content specification before you request the next. After each user response, ask one or two follow up questions about specific aspects of the user’s response that could be expanded on or articulated more explicitly. However, be sure to allow the user to skip and continue to the next content specification if they do not want to answer the follow up questions. After the final user response is entered, generate a copy of all of the user’s responses organized into a single text with the user’s answers to any follow up questions incorporated into the text naturally. Title this text Reflective Journal Entry along with the date and label the three sections of the text: Description of the Teaching Experience, Analysis of the Teaching Experience, and Moving Forward.









Topic 5: Free Professional Development Resources 

There are plenty of online options to access academic content and interact with English teachers from around Costa Rica and the world. 

PD Talks: Professional Development Sessions
PD Talks is a free monthly webinar series for English teachers organized by Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano and hosted by me. Usually held on the last Friday of the month from 3:00 to 5:00 pm, these sessions consist of a 90 minute online workshop with breakout room tasks which allow you to meet and interact with other teachers from around the world. In 2024 alone, teachers from 62 countries connected to our 12 talks. 



  • Register for PD Talk 77 on May 30: CLICK HERE to register for the talk Decolonizing the Curriculum: Empowering Educators to Center Students' Voices and Experiences by Yuliana Brenes. 


NCTE 2025
The National Conference for Teachers of English Costa Rica is annual event that brings together language teachers from around the country and beyond. For the last five years, NCTE has had a free online component with the option to connect to twelve professional development webinars. CLICK HERE to follow the NCTE Facebook page and learn more about what is coming this July!



Join the CoP
We also have a private website called CCCN's Community of Practice which hosts our Teacher Development Video Library, a collection of over 160 video recording of talks and workshops from NCTE, PD Talks, and other professional develpment events over the past five years. They are organized into categories to help you find something relevant to you. All of the resources are free but you must register to access the site. CLICK HERE to create your profile. 



LinkedIn Newsletters
LinkedIn is not only a place to look for a job, it's a great site for connecting with and learning from other language teachers and content creators. Here are some of my favorite LinkedIn newsletters to follow:


Language Teaching Podcasts
These are some of my favorite teaching podcasts to listen to when driving to work.


Language Teaching Webinars
There are tons of free webinars available online on many different topics related to language teaching. Here are a few great sources.





Topic 6: Final Thoughts

Teacher Jennifer and Teacher Johnny, whom we described in the warm up to this session, are not just imaginary characters. They represent Dornyei’s (2014) ideas about the importance of developing a clear vision of your possible future selves, the ideal future teacher self you hope to become some day and the other self that you are afraid of becoming. If you have the vision of those two possible professional developmental trajectories, you can take active steps now to move closer to one and away from the other. We'll close with this quote from Murray (2010). "Effective professional development is self-empowerment. Deciding to take the first step is your responsibility, and that step is well worth taking" (p. 10). Your professional development journey starts today!

Discussion: Discuss the following questions with the people sitting near you.
  • What is something I want to remember about the first part of today's session when the speaker toaked about what it means to be a professional and how professional teachers learn and grow?
  • What is one professional development strategy or resource from the second part of the session that I might like to try?
  • What other ideas does today's session make me think about?










References:

Borg, S. (2003). Teacher cognition in language teaching: A review of research on what language teachers think, know, believe, and do. Language Teaching, 36(2). pp. 81-109. ISSN 147—3049.

Borton, T. (1970). Reach, Teach, and Touch. McGraw Hill.

Brookfield, S. (2006). The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Cormier, M. (2023). CCCN's Professional Development Model: How do Teachers Learn and Develop Over Time at CCCN?. Unpublished Manuscript, Academic Department, Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano, San José, Costa Rica. 

Crandall, J. & Christison, M. (2016). An overview of research in English language teacher education and professional development. In J. Crandall and M. Christison (Ed.s), Teacher Education and Professional Development in TESOL: Global Perspectives. Routledge. 

Crandall, J. & Miller, S. (2014). Effective Professional Development for Language Teachers. In M. Celce-Murcia, D. Brinton, & M. Snow (Eds.), Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (4th ed., pp 630-648). National Geographic Learning.

Dornyei, Z. (2014). Motivation in second language learning. In M. Celce-Murcia, D. Brinton, & M. A. Snow (Eds.), Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (4th ed., pp. 518-531). National Geographic Learning.

Farrell, T. (2009). The Novice Teacher Experience. In A. Burns & J. C. Richards (Eds.), The Cambridge Guide to Language Teacher Education (pp. 182-189). Cambridge University Press.

Farrell, T. (2019). Reflective Practice in ELT. Equinox.

Farrell, T. (2022). Reflective Practice in Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.


Freeman, D. (1989). Teacher Training, Development, and Decision Making: A Model of Teaching and Related Strategies for Language Teacher Education. TESOL Quarterly, 23(1), 27-45. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587506


Freeman, D. (2016). Educating Second Language Teachers. Oxford University Press.

Gibbs, G. (1988). Learning by Doing: A Guide to Teaching and Learning Methods. Further Education Unit Oxford Polytechnic.

Lortie, D. (1975). Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study. University of Chicago Press.

McLeod, S. (2025, March 18). Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive Development. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/vygotsky.html


Palmer, P. (1997). The Heart of a Teacher: Identity and Integrity in Teaching. Change Magazine 29(6). pp. 14-21.


Rossner, R. (2017). Language Teaching Competences. Oxford University Press.

Thornbury, S. (2006). An A-Z of ELT. Macmillan.

Ur, P. (2002). The English Teacher as Professional. In J. Richards & W. Renandya (Eds.), Methodology in Language Teaching: An Anthology of Current Practice (pp. 388-392). Cambridge University Press.

Wenger-Trayner, E. & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015). Introduction to Communities of Practice. Retrieved from https://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/











Session Details and Author Information

Session Title: Dont' Stop Now: Professional Development Opportunities for Early Career Teachers

Session Abstract: We know that learning is a lifelong process and one of our goals as English teachers should be to equip students with the skills they need to continue their language learning journey on their own once they have completed their course of study. The same can be said for teachers. Graduating with a teaching degree is just the beginning of a career-long process of ongoing professional learning and development. Language teaching is a challenging profession and early career teachers especially can benefit from adopting a critical but curious mindset, cultivating a personal reflective practice, collaborating actively with other teachers, and setting and regularly revisiting personal professional development goals. Lucky for us, there are plenty of opportunities to engage in professional development, even for teachers in remote areas with limited resources. This interactive talk will introduce a selection of frameworks to help beginning teachers conceptualize the importance of ongoing professional development and explore practical answers to questions such as:
  • What does it mean to be a professional in the field of English language teaching?
  • How can I engage in professional development opportunities on my own and with other teachers?
  • What kind of teacher do I want to be and how can I take active steps to attain that role?

Author: Mark Foster Cormier

Author Bio: Mark Foster Cormier is an English teacher and teacher educator who is passionate about materials development, reflective practice, and professional development in ELT. He earned a master of arts in TESOL from Marlboro College and bachelor’s degrees in English teaching and Latin American studies from Universidad Americana and Appalachian State University. Mark has been an EFL teacher in Costa Rica for 16 years and has specialized in teacher development for over a decade. He currently works as Head of Training and Professional Development at Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano where he is in charge of new teacher recruiting and training, planning ongoing professional development initiatives, and hosting the monthly webinar series for language teachers called PD Talks: Professional Development Sessions. Click here to connect with Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-cormier-elt/
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