Teaching staff and their responsibilities

Teachers in the ELT departments, like other teachers in the institutes, are carefully chosen according to their academic records, personalities, characteristics, and their fulfillment of the job requirements and specifications. Most importantly perhaps is their feeling that the department can contribute to their academic and social status. Teachers usually apply for this job and are chosen based on their qualifications and skills. All applications are assessed by a committee determined by the Dean and the Head of the Institute and the successful applicants are invited for interviews to assess their oral performance before they are granted the job.

The teaching staff at the ELT department consists of two kinds; the permanent staff and the temporary. Most teachers, if not all, in the permanent staff are teachers who have received a scholarship from the institute to get a Master’s degree in TESOL in an English-speaking country. After getting their degree, these teachers have to come back and work in the institute for a period equivalent of double the period they spent abroad. They are required to work for 12-14 hours a week, during which they are responsible for teaching either the university teaching staff (also under the heading of ‘professional courses’) or the teaching assistants (so-called ‘teaching assistant courses’), as these courses are normally offered for free to university staff. These two kinds of courses are taught in the morning, which enables teachers to choose to have more classes in the evening and in doing so make extra money.

The other kind of teachers consists of the temporary staff who are employed by the State in the institute but who get temporary contracts. Teachers in the temporary

staff differ in their academic degrees and work experience. However, most of them are chosen because they have proved to be qualified enough to teach on these courses. Before they start teaching, all teachers in this group get intensive teaching training sessions for around a period of three months. After that, they are considered to be eligible to teach classes, mostly in the evening. Usually teachers who teach the evening classes are responsible for teaching general English to learners who are looking for some language skill improvement. Teachers in the evening classes are just paid for the face-to-face teaching.

In addition to these two kinds of teachers, in 2007 the institutes opened the door to a third group of staff teachers, namely teaching assistants (of whom I am one). This group is considered to be the first group of teaching assistants who have received their scholarships from the Higher Institutes of Languages and who have attained a PhD degree in a specific discipline named by the department to which they belong. The teaching assistants are required, therefore, to come back and teach in their departments after getting their PhDs for a period that is double the period they spent abroad. It is worth mentioning that as of the date of this current research, no teaching assistant has yet come back with a PhD.

Teachers from the three groups are also encouraged to have some other hours teaching English to the non-specialist, first or second year students, at the various colleges at the Syrian universities. Teachers in the ELT departments meet weekly with the head of department to discuss major issues related to the classes, students, and the department's other responsibilities. These meetings have a great impact of enhancing the relationships between teachers and the feeling of belonging to the department and having a responsibility towards: the advancement of ELT in the schools and the development of students who are taught English courses; the experience gained by the teachers, and the ELT department as a whole.

At this point, the important role the English teachers play in the processes of development and change seems unquestionable. As such, teachers are always welcomed and encouraged to express their views and attitudes regarding classroom issues or the teaching materials in hand since they are the ones who use these materials in their classrooms. However, these views are not extended beyond the

scope of these meetings and are not perceived as having that great an impact on policy-making. Usually the Head of the Institute and the Dean of the Institute who are the ones who take decisions and who have the final say about matters regarding the teaching materials and the classroom issues.

Therefore, teachers' participation in this current research study, whether in evaluating the current teaching materials or giving opinions regarding new ones, is viewed as having the potential to yield constructive and informative results. This is especially the case as most of teachers at the institute also teach the English subject for non-English specialist students at university level. Because of such an involvement (sometimes with the same students at university and private courses) these teachers often display an acute awareness of the learners' different needs and requirements as well as some familiarity with the associated aims and objectives of learning English.

Within the scope of these, I aim in my study to further investigate the effective role the English language teachers might play in the process of changing the current teaching materials and developing a new ELT curriculum. I also attempt to display what teachers' attitudes to curriculum change are at both national and international levels with reference to various secondary sources. In addition, I investigate the teachers' different experiences of educational changes and their views about their future involvement in the designing of a new curriculum and its implementation.