ABSTRACT
Viewing inservice teachers as a part of their instructional system allows teacher educators and teachers to better utilize the resources available locally, both those in teachers’ own experiences and in their instructional contexts, to promote professional development. This view, however, has not been evident in many professional development initiatives in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts, where new theories or pedagogical innovations are presented in a lecture-style workshop (Guefrachi & Troudi, 2000; Parrott, 1993) and without knowledge of the local context (Dubin & Wong, 1990). This “jug-and-mug approach” (Parrott, 1993) assumes that theoretical and pedagogical innovations, often coming from outside of a teacher’s immediate context and experience, are learned through the process of being poured into inservice teachers. Despite the prevalence of this professional development approach, research in second language teacher education suggests that teacher development assists teachers to the extent that it links new teaching approaches to a teacher’s instructional context (Au, 1990; Martin, 1993).
