Impact of Studying Abroad on English Language Teachers at University Level in Bangladesh

Abstract

The study addresses an issue regarding the English language teachers who have studied abroad and are teaching at the tertiary level of education in Bangladesh. The idea of this study comes out of my professional experience and my encounter with fellow ELT practitioners. I have been in the field of language teaching for the past fourteen years and at Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh for the last seven years where I watch my students turning into my colleagues. I noticed that the increasing demand for competent users of English in this era of globalization has also made my colleagues interested in getting education from Western developed countries like their predecessors. Equally has grown the demand for English Language Teaching (ELT) and related studies like Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). Much investigation has been carried out on the experiences of the teachers while they were studying abroad but no studies have been carried out on the returning teachers and the episode after. This study, thus, is an attempt to explore what prompted these teachers to study abroad, whether these Western trained teachers on their return have made changes to their teaching approaches, how or in what ways have they done it, what sort of obstacles did they face or are they facing and what measures can be taken to overcome these barriers. These issues are central in connection to the future of English language teaching at the university level and based on the opinions of the teachers, the study provides recommendations to bridge the gap between the existing language teaching policy and practice.