the perception and the impact of professional development activities on novice iranian english teachers

Teachers from the beginning of their career face with various kinds of students and institutions, which may result in an inevitable struggle to comply with all these challenges. professional development programs (pdp) seem to be one of the ways for maintaining a high standard of teaching. professional development of language teachers is one major measure to ensure that teachers remain updated and avoid the risk or leaving the profession. not all teachers, however, attend professional development workshops or engage in such activities for the sake of developing professionally. to explore the type of pd activities english teachers in iran participate in and also to understand the motivations behind their participation, the researchers interviewed 15 novice english teachers. the results show that novice teachers benefited from professional development activities. the motivations for taking part in pd activities ranged from ‘having no motivation’ to ‘promoting my english’ to ‘being able to teach at university’. in addition, some novice teachers were hard working and eager to be known as international english teachers. take note that no such research was conducted on novice teachers and english teaching students before. further results and implications for teacher education in iran and beyond are discussed in the paper.