Theory & Practice of Professionalism in ELT

Professionalism is a term that is often used to describe practices within ELT, but rarely precisely defined and is therefore amenable to widely differing interpretations. Within ELT the discourse of professionalism co-exists alongside practices that would not normally be associated with a traditional understanding of the term, such as low pay, job insecurity, a lack of any coherent career structure, and an absence of any agreed professional standards. Are such concepts, then, either applicable or useful for teachers in ELT? Twenty years ago, Johnson (1997) conducted a study based on life-history interviews with seventeen EFL teachers based in Poland, to uncover whether their working lives could “best be conceptualized in terms of career and profession or whether other theoretical approaches might be more fruitful” (Johnson, 1997, p 681) Based on interviews with a small sample group of experienced teachers working in south-east Asia, drawing upon Johnson’s research and taking up his appeal for more empirical data on teachers’ lives to be collected, this paper attempts to address the question of what is it like to work in the ELT industry and in doing so poses the question of how much has changed in the intervening years since Johnson’s study.