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Teachers’ roles, responsibilities and challengesSurvey responses indicate that teachers have to prepare lessons, tests,supplementary materials and homework, and they must mark tests andhomework (see Figure 3 below). Fifty-four per cent can choose their owncoursebook which means that for a large minority, this important lesson planningdocument is imposed. More worryingly, approximately 1,700 teachers pay fortheir own resources; these can be anything from batteries to power CD playersto microphones to project over noisy classes. Nearly half are responsible fororganising out-of-school activities.As a regular part of your job, do you …4,0003,5003,0002,5002,0001,5001,000500YesNo0prepare class tests?prepare final examinations?mark tests and/or examinations?prepare your own lessons?choose your own course book?prepare supplementaryclass activities?give the children homework?mark homework?pay for resources (eg batteries)?organise out of schoolactivities in English?Figure 3: ResponsibilitiesWhen asked about factors that would improve learning and teaching in theircontexts, training in new language teaching methodologies was ranked as the mostimportant, followed by smaller classes and better access to new technologies suchas DVDs or computers (see Figure 4 below). These issues have all been identifiedby previous research as reported above. However, fewer tests/examinationswere ranked as the least important, followed by starting English at an earlier age.Surprisingly, given reports in previous research, improvements in the teacher’slevel of English was also ranked as less important. It seems likely that this finding isa function of the questionnaire sample, whose level of English, as noted above, isprobably higher than average.50 | Global Practices Young Learners