2003; Sparks, 2004; Bonner, 2006). 
Recently LITU was requested by a high school to run a training course for their teachers on Advanced 
Reading-Writing and Essay Writing. The course was a kind of teacher-driven professional development activity. 
The teachers analyzed their own needs and specified what type of training they wanted. They were interested in 
gaining all sorts of skills required for teaching highly-motivated and above-average students: classroom 
management, instructional skills, and in improving their own language proficiency. This school is not quite 
typical in that it aims to become a world-class science school. In order to help with financial support and to 
encourage cooperation among peers, the school collaborated with a few local high schools, encouraging 
participants from them to join the training so that costs could be shared. 
The outcome of this course was highly satisfactory. The average score from 31 participants representing the 
course satisfaction, which included the course content, activities, and other relevant concerns, was 4.91 out of 5 
of the ranking scale. Thus was the researcher inspired to speculate as to whether the aforementioned training 
courses satisfactorily served the needs of the participants. Could the training activities be initiated and conducted 
by the participating teachers themselves instead? Mightn’t it be more fruitful if they had opportunities to choose 
their own areas of interest, establish networks and interact with peers who share common interests? 
In addition, another issue came to mind. The interested participants, except for those from the initiating school, 
paid their own fees or were partially supported by their schools, and they spent five weekend-days to participate 
in the course. Such willingness supports the idea that school teachers inadequately get opportunities and support 
for professional development despite their interest in self-improvement in their chosen careers. Opportunities for 
them to attend seminars such as the annual Thailand TESOL conferences are rare. Each year, LITU finances 
more than fifteen teachers to participate in said conferences, both as presenters and attendees, while teachers in 
some schools sign up to show their desire to attend the conferences, but only a few from each school get both 
permission and financial assistance to do so (personal communication with three teachers from three secondary 
schools at a conference, January 2012). 
In fact, the Ministry of Education has been giving assistance to teachers by already setting up 88 English 
Resource and Instruction Centres (ERIC) in many educational regional areas. One of the activities organized by 
an ERIC is to run professional development sessions for English teachers. Some interesting questions are raised: 
Have those sessions adequately and directly served the teachers’ needs? Have the teachers had opportunities to 
say what their problems are and what kind of professional development they need? What level of difficulties 
teachers are having in their teaching context? 
Apart from the teacher quality, the student motivation, the curricula and textbooks, the assessment methods, and 
other supporting factors such as teaching aids, class sizes, and time allocation are often said to exacerbate the 
English language teaching problems in Thailand. Thus, with the present unsatisfactory results of English 
language teaching and learning and obvious desires for professional development of English teachers, the 
researcher aimed to get a clearer picture of the problems secondary school teachers are facing and to find out if 
those teachers need any kind of professional development