Becoming an English Teacher: Voices from Nepal

Abstract

Motivations for choosing English teacher as a career have attracted considerable attention in recent years, and a number of research studies have been conducted to gain insights into pre-service and in-service teachers’ reasons for entering teacher education programmes. This study aimed at investigating motivating factors to choose English language teaching as a career. It also aimed at exploring the job satisfaction level of the participants, and the professional development activities they adopt to develop their professional competence. Five teachers of English who have been teaching English at different levels of education in Nepal for ten years now participated in this study. The narrative inquiry approach was adopted as a research design for this study. Interview was used as a tool for data collection. The study contains qualitative data only. The data were described and analyzed descriptively. The study revealed that the participants chose English teacher as career due to the influence of their role model English teachers; the love for the subject, the social prestige the English teachers deserved and the passion for teaching. The participants are satisfied with positions they hold as they have been able to help the adults to learn. Their motives for selecting job are guided by intrinsic motives such as interest, personal experience, intellectual fulfillment, and altruistic ones. The findings also indicated that they adopt different activities to develop their professional competence such as taking part in workshops, seminars, becoming members of professional community, attending ELT and applied linguistics conferences