Teaching English as a Foreign Languate and Using English as a Medium of Instruction in Egypt: Teachersâ Perceptions of Teaching Approaches and Sources of Change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the internationalization of English there is a growing demand for high quality English language education around the globe, particularly in non-English speaking countries. Consequently, there is an increasing demand worldwide for competent English teachers and more effective approaches to teaching and teacher professional development. In Egypt, in a context of educational reform where communicative language teaching approaches have been adopted as a way to improve teaching, this study explores how teachers perceive and respond to this call for change in instructional practices. It examines the professional development experiences of a group of English as a foreign language (EFL) and English-medium subject (EMS) teachers working in the private and public basic educational sectors in Cairo, Egypt. The research questions focus on teachers’ perceptions of change and improvement occurring in their teaching practices, their beliefs on the sources of change available to them, and the perspectives of school principals and professional development providers on teachers’ change prospects. \nIn this study, a multi-method approach was applied, with a teacher survey administered to 174 teachers; in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 36 teachers, 15 principals, and 8 professional development (PD) providers; field observation; and examination of relevant documents and artifacts. The analysis of data is informed by sociocultural theory perspectives (Vygotsky, 1978).\nThe findings indicate that (1) teachers perceive great change in their practices, though their conceptions and implementation of communicative approaches are context-bound, (2) teaching is influenced by various professional learning opportunities, and (3) change or lack thereof results from teachers’ adaptability to their local contextual demands through a process of resistance, resilience, or maintaining the status quo.\nThe findings highlight the centrality of teachers in change processes.They suggest that change results from a process of interaction between teachers and other individuals within their community, and that the nature of change as experienced by the participants is shaped by a multitude of contextual factors. The implications of the study include the need to replace the technical conception of professional development with a more ecological orientation, to establish professional learning communities among teachers and within schools, and to establish a coherent framework for change initiatives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".