Factors Influencing Teachers' Professional learning: A Study of Turkish EFL Teachers

The primary aim of this thesis was to investigate the factors influencing teachers' professional learning the most under four factors; (a) teacher cognition and beliefs, (b) teacher emotions, (c) teacher motivation, and (d) contextual variables and find out whether or not there is a difference between gender, teacher experience, teaching level (primary school, secondary school, and high school), degree (Bachelor's degree, Master's degree, and PhD), age and teaching level. The research sample consisted of 1015 teachers of English from different cities, teaching levels, and various ages in Turkey. In order to find out what factors influence English Teachers' professional learning the most, English Language Teacher Learning Scale (ELTLS) which was developed by Aliakbari and Malmir (2017) to measure only English teachers' learning was used. The data collected through this instrument was analyzed by using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS 21.0). Frequencies, percentages, mean and standard deviation values were calculated for the analysis of the data, and to find out the differences, independent samples t-test and one way ANOVA were used. According to the results, teacher cognition and beliefs factor influenced teacher learning the most with a mean of 3.98 and contextual variables were the second influencing factor with a mean of 3.52. Teacher cognition and beliefs factor consists of some sub-dimensions which are subject matter knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, prior learning experience, teaching experience, personal theories, teacher commitment, teachers' awareness and sensitivity, peer observation, and self-reflection. When examined the differences it was found out that there was statistically significant difference only between teacher cognition and beliefs, and teacher experience. The post-hoc test revealed that there was statistically significant difference between 21 and above year-experienced teachers and 0-5 year-experienced in teacher cognition and beliefs factor (p<.05).