Additionally, a few respondents emphasized at the open-ended section on their overloaded teaching and
administrative tasks; everyone had been responsible for more than three administrative tasks. About ten teachers
said students lacked patient and additional practice of English outside class; students always came back to class
with blank eyes. A few respondents pointed out their obligation to teach students in a tutorial manner for school
examinations and the university entrance examination, rather than teaching for communication.
3.3 Responses to Research Objective Two
To investigate the professional development needs of English language teachers in those schools. The summary
of the findings is as follows:
3.3.1 Types of PD Needs
The respondents showed a moderate level of PD needs. The most valued PD types involved 1) three to five days
of training, seminars or conferences, 2) study trips in Thailand and overseas and 3) furthering their study either
in Thailand or overseas (mean scores: 3.59-3.38). The respondents showed the least attention to the two to three
month training courses (mean = 2.79).
3.3.2 Content Areas of Professional Development
Although the respondents showed a moderate level of PD needs, surprisingly, they showed a high level of
agreement on every single content area listed in the questionnaire. There were top seven areas yielding the mean
scores of over 4, which included 1) teaching strategies that enable students to communicate in English, 2) their
own English proficiency development, especially in listening-speaking and writing skills, 3) teaching
listening-speaking to students, 4) teaching language and culture, and 5) teaching writing (mean scores:
4.15-4.00). The area that seemed the least problematic or needed was knowledge about using a student-centered
teaching approach, even though the mean score was quite high (mean = 3.56).
Also, from the responses to the open-ended questions, 37% of them were willing to cover for their own expenses if/when they could not get financial support from their school for the PD programs they wanted to attend. Two of them said most available PD programs crashed with their heavy teaching schedules.