The aim of the present study is threefold. It aims at a) uncovering the EFL teachers’ perceptions of PD, b) exploring the barriers to their PD, and c) investigating the role of teaching experience in their PD perception. Two hundred EFL teachers of the private language institutes participated in the study by sitting a semi-structured interview and completing two Likert-scale questionnaires developed, pilot tested and validated by the researchers. The results of descriptive statistics showed that the participants perceived PD to help them boost their pedagogical knowledge, remain up-to-date, share their ideas and experiences with their peers and supervisors and enhance their classroom management knowledge and skills. Additionally, the findings of descriptive statistics revealed the most important barrier to teachers’ PD included lack of team work spirit among teachers to share their experiences and ideas with each other. Furthermore, the results of an Independent Samples t-test indicated a significant difference between high-experienced and low-experienced teachers in terms of their perception of PD with the former group having more positive and higher perception of PD than the latter group. The results of the study might prove fruitful to policy makers and managers of language institutes to obviate the potential barriers lying in the way of EFL teachers’ PD as found in the present study.
