Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Second Language Teacher Education: Challenges and New Horizons, Vienna, Avusturya, 15 - 17 Eylül 2022, ss.34
Although being a teacher seems to center upon the act of teaching, it is more than that. As a profession, teaching requires a life-long learning process by which teachers can develop their professional skills and be more beneficial to their students. As a basic principle of professional development, both pre-service and in-service teachers need to be open to criticisms, evaluate themselves and reflect on their actions in their classrooms, all of which could be accomplished by reflective practice (Johari, 2006). It acts as a mirror in teaching as teachers can have the chance to see their own strengths and aspects that need improvement through reflective practice (Farrell, 2012; Zahid & Khanam, 2019) . In this regard, this study aims to find out the impacts of self-reports as reflective practice for Turkish pre-service ELT teachers. The participants of this study are 20 senior pre-service ELT teachers. As a part of their practicum course, they were asked to write self-reports immediately after they carried out a lesson to state the aspects that they thought positive or negative
and make constructive self-criticism when needed. The self-reports were analyzed through thematic analysis with the software Nvivo 12, and recurrent patterns were detected in the participants’ reflections. The results reveal that pre-service ELT teachers are going through common challenges during their practicum period. Self-reflections give insights concerning pre-service ELT teachers’ awareness of their professional growth. The study highlights several pedagogical implications which can be conducive to the promotion of reflective practice in ELT practicum programs so that pre-service teachers can maximize the benefit that they get from their teaching practice and become more self-aware language teachers. Finally, various suggestions for further studies are also presented.