An Investigation of Male and Female ESP/EAP Teachers’ Professional Development Activities

EFL teachers’ Continuing Professional Development (CPD) has always been of much concern to all applied linguists and EFL teachers. The present study investigates Iranian ESP/EAP teachers' kinds of CPD activities. To this end, a mixed-methods research design has been applied. In the first phase, a phenomenological research method was used. Seventeen participants were interviewed, and the main CPD activities were extracted through content analysis of the interviews. The participants argued that they developed their profession through teaching (work), continuing their education, attending CPD events such as conferences and workshops, presenting their works in CPD events, and self-study activities such as reading journals, books, and watching films and movies, etc. In the second phase, a researcher-developed instrument was administered to 60 male and female ESP teachers who were selected through convenience sampling among all those who taught ESP at the State and Azad Universities in Tehran. The data were collected and analyzed through descriptive and inferential statistics. The results showed that male and female teachers do some common CPD activities. However, male and female teachers are different in terms of some other CPD activities. The findings have several implications for administrators, higher education institutes, teacher trainers, and teachers of the other majors.