The participants of the teacher interview study

not only to the way teachers usually develop during their careers but also to the way they should ideally develop.

In retrospect, the majority of the learner interviews provided abundant data for analysis. There were three interviews, however, which were somewhat poorer in insights; the three youngest female respondents, Erin, Dorothy and Sylvia, turned out to be immature to provide as much data as the others. Occasionally, they did not answer my questions and kept talking about irrelevant topics. Nevertheless, I decided to include all the interviews in the analysis, since younger participants’ perspectives were considered to be equally important.

experience and were respected and acknowledged members of the ELT community in Hungary. In order to ensure that the opinions of teachers from different backgrounds are heard, participants were chosen to represent different categories in education: primary, secondary and higher education language teaching (see Table 5 for details).

Table 5 Teacher participants: A breakdown according to school types Primary Secondary Higher education Total

Less experienced 2 2 2 6

Experienced 1 3 2 6

Also, the intention was to interview the same number of teachers in Budapest as in the countryside to allow comparisons and to diminish bias (See Table 6). Although the population of Budapest is around one fifth of the country, it is an educational centre as well.

Consequently, the proportion of participants from Budapest was chosen to equal that of participants from outside Budapest. An attempt was made to keep a balance and have two representatives from each different school type in Hungary but no outstanding experienced primary teacher from the countryside was identified. In fact, most participants interviewed have taught at more than one type of school as can be seen from Table 7 and only five have taught at only one type of school. Even those who seem to be experts at one category, e.g. P8, who has taught at the very same secondary school for 28 years, have also been involved in at least one other type of teaching: one-to-one teaching, adult education or language school teaching or a combination of two or all three of those.

Table 6 Teacher participants: A breakdown according to school location Budapest Countryside Total

Less experienced 3 3 6

Experienced 3 3 6

Altogether twelve interviews were recorded with teacher participants between the ages 24 and 64. Ten of the participants were women, two were men. The six experienced teachers altogether had 141 years of English language teaching experience while the six less experienced teachers had 33 years of experience. On average, the experienced teachers had approximately 23 years of experience, while the less experienced teachers had an average of less than six years’ experience. The average age of the experienced participants was 54, whereas that of the less experienced participants was 32. The sample in this strand of the study thus is similar to the participants of the Huberman study, in which Swiss teachers with 5-39 years of experience participated (1993, p. 27). For more details see Table 7.

Table 7 Biodata about teacher participants

(E refers to experienced, L to less experienced teachers)

Teaching experience (in years)

ID Sex Age Institution E/L

Primary Secondary Higher Education

P1 Female 60-69 Higher education E 2 Ø 19

P2 Female 40-49 Secondary school E Ø 21 Ø

P3 Female 50-59 Primary and secondary E 14 5 1

P4 Female 30-39 Primary and secondary L 4.5 4.5 4

P5 Male 20-29 Higher education L Ø 0.5 1.5

P6 Female 30-39 Primary and secondary L 3.5 Ø Ø

P7 Female 40-49 Secondary E Ø 16 Ø

P8 Male 50-59 Secondary E 28 Ø Ø

P9 Female 60-69 Primary and higher education E 8 Ø 27

P10 Female 40-49 Primary L 10 Ø Ø

P11 Female 20-29 Secondary L 1 5 Ø

P12 Female 30-39 Secondary and higher education L Ø 2 4

The teacher participants teach in different institutions, with only two pairs of participants working in the same school: P3 and P4 worked in the same secondary school in Budapest (with a special eight-year-long programme) and P9 and P12 worked at the same university. To the researcher’s knowledge, it is only these two pairs of participants who know each other, the others do not. Altogether, participants graduated from nine different institutions, only three graduated from the same institution, P2, P4 and P5, and even these participants underwent different teacher education programmes, having graduated at different times. All respondents were Hungarian, with the exception of P1, who is a native speaker of English.

P1 is a well-known teacher, director of studies and teacher in Hungary. At the time of the interview she worked as head of the Languages Department in a higher education institution in Budapest. She is known to have been a quasi-mentor for a lot of English language teaching professionals in Hungary.

P2 has been a secondary school teacher all her life in a high-prestige secondary school in Budapest. She originally graduated with a degree in the teaching of English and Russian but has never taught Russian since it ceased to be a compulsory language in Hungary around the time when she started teaching.

P3 had been a well-known teacher and teacher trainer in Budapest but was working in the library of her school at the time when the interview was conducted. After many years of supervising trainee teachers at her school, she was already preparing for retirement.

P4 was working at the same school as P3. She was a novice teacher there being responsible for both upper primary and secondary school classes (Grades five to twelve). She was recommended to me as was a very enthusiastic and energetic teacher.

P5 was a young and ambitious man eager to start his PhD studies at the age of 24. He was considered to be an up-and-coming teacher who did his best to excel at his job. After the interview this teacher actually decided to leave Budapest for Britain to study there.

P6, from Budapest, was a false-beginner in the profession in the sense that after graduating she worked elsewhere, not in the teaching profession, and when she became older she made the decision to resume teaching. A relatively old inexperienced teacher, she relied very heavily on her superior for help but she was regarded as a very good teacher by her colleagues in the primary school.

P7 was a 47-year old teacher in a provincial secondary school with a Master’s degree in English and Russian. The school is known to be one of the best in the city (population approximately 170,000), with a dual language programme and a much higher number of applicants than they can admit. Apart from teaching at her school, this participant also had some years of experience in teaching at a language school. She has fewer years of experience than one would expect because of having been on maternity leave for seven years.

P8 teaches in the same city as P7 but in another renowned school. He is a 53-year-old school-based mentor, a position he said he had achieved by becoming old enough. He holds a Master’s degree in teaching English and Russian and is also known to be the head of the city’s best language school.

P9 is a retiring teacher and teacher trainer working in both Hungary and England. She is also a mother of four, which she thinks has helped her a lot in developing her teaching skills. Originally, she graduated with a degree in teaching English and German from a provincial university. At the beginning of her career she was one of the founders of a language school in Budapest, where she was in charge of young learners. When she was interviewed, she was retiring from a higher education institution in the countryside where she was instrumental in shaping BA and MA programmes.

According to P10, she is a teacher in the second best primary school in a provincial town of 100,000 inhabitants. The school, which has about 500 pupils, offers English language specialization classes. She was involved in the teaching of all grades when she was interviewed. P10 was recommended to me by her teacher trainer, whose daughter studies at the given primary school and who regrets that her daughter is not taught by P10, the best English teacher in the school.

P11 worked in a vocational secondary school in a provincial town. She had a college degree in teaching English and Italian. She is a young, enthusiastic and cheerful teacher with an abundant source of energy. When she was interviewed she was a student as well, learning developmental pedagogy, which she believed she needed for handling special needs pupils at her school.

P12 was considered to be a less experienced teacher by her colleagues because she returned to teaching after many years of maternity leave. Prior to having children, she worked in a secondary school for two years and then had a non-teaching job. She has now been involved in higher education in a provincial town for four years and thinks this type of education better suits her. She also taught at language schools for altogether five years, therefore she cannot truly be regarded as an inexperienced teacher but rather as a teacher who has relatively less experience than her colleagues at the university where she works. At the time of the interview she was considering what directions to take in her career, so the interview she said was a good opportunity to think some fundamental questions over, such as whether she would be willing to stay in higher education or not, whether to enrol in a teaching training program abroad or a PhD programme in Hungary.

The interviews were conducted in two rounds. The Budapest teachers were interviewed in the first round, which provided the basis for the development of the survey questionnaire, whereas teachers from outside Budapest were interviewed later, after the

responses to the questionnaire had been collected. The initial phase greatly helped the distillation of teachers’ beliefs into statements, which could later be used in the national survey, whereas the second phase assisted in the saturation of data.