A Critical Appraisal of a Teacher Development Course on the Teaching of Reading Skills at a Macau Middle School

Abstract

This paper examines the effectiveness of a teacher education course delivered at a Macau middle school to a group of in-service English teachers and its implication for the field of teacher education. The course was centred on the teaching of reading skills and based on a theoretical framework, which could be described as broadly based on communicative language teaching (CLT). The teachers who took part in the course were given the opportunity to complete short questionnaires about their experience on the course and make themselves available for semi-structured interviews. Fifteen of the eighteen teachers who took part in the course completed questionnaires and five interviews were carried out. Interviewees were self-selecting but covered a range of teaching experience. The findings indicated that while participants found some value in the teacher education, the prevailing view was that many of the input items delivered either needed major adaptation or were unsuitable for the context in which classroom teaching took place. As a result of this, a more systematic acquisition of contextual knowledge is recommended, before in-house teacher development is offered in any individual school.