ARE GENERIC AND ENGLISH TEACHER COMPETENCIES SUFFICIENT AND REALISTIC ENOUGH?

This study aims to find out and compare the perspectives of both pre-service and in-service English teachers about the generic and field-specific teacher competencies in Turkish EFL context. 213 pre-service and 38 in-service English teachers participated in the study. Qualitative research methods were utilized to gather and analyse the data. The findings indicate that there is uniformity between the pre-service and in-service participants. It was also found that mostly the participant English teachers were uninformed about these competencies and they were found to have contrasting opinions about the related competencies because some of them do not find these competencies sufficient or realistic enough while some of them see these competencies as a way of professionalism. They also make some suggestions about how to integrate these competencies into existing teacher training system.