A FOUR-STAGE ASSESSMENT OF AUL (AZERBAIJAN UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES) TEACHERS ’ ABILITIES TO ADAPT INNOVATIVE TEACHING APPROACHES

The purpose of this article is to investigate the best teacher evaluation method that can reveal English language teachers ’ abilities to adapt to modern teaching approaches under the conditions of innovative and progressive language teaching trends. It is also extremely important to find out the general problems that prevent some of the teachers from using innovative ELT approaches and techniques. Thus, within the general area of teachers ’ assessment, twenty teachers from Azerbaijan University of Languages with the work experience of over fifteen years have been selected for a four-stage evaluation process that consisted of general English language knowledge testing, class management observation, teachers ’ self-evaluation, and evaluation of the selected teachers done by their students. The analysis of the completed assessment demonstrates that the best method of teachers ’ evaluation is class management observation, since three other assessment methods seem to be subjective and often groundless. When it comes to the problems preventing the use of innovative approaches, the most outstanding reasons are the inability of teachers to use technology, and their unwillingness to adapt to innovations, considering old methods to be the most prominent ones