ABSTRACT
Drawing on evidence from English in Action, a successful large-scale, 10-year, in-service English language teacher development program in Bangladesh, this chapter examines how the development of high-quality pedagogies can be fostered, supported consistently, and ultimately sustained in often challenging circumstances. Beginning with an examination of how quality in ELT can be characterized in a way that can successfully be shared by project participants at all levels, it goes on to examine how the program’s pedagogical model was adopted by successively larger groups of teachers across the country. It considers how sustainability was initially fostered by a carefully tailored, teacher-centered approach that took full account of teachers’ existing approaches, understandings, and dispositions as well as curricular constraints, and was, in its later stages, bolstered by a range of strategies to embed the program into the national education system. The chapter reflects on the respective roles of face-to-face support in both training and classroom settings, reflective practice, school and national educational cultures, the backwash effects of examinations, appropriate technology, the relationship between teachers’ pedagogical and target language expertise, and the importance of a robust research, monitoring, and evaluation program. The last of these provides qualitative and quantitative evidence to underpin the arguments advanced.
