Agile or fragile: Are you ready to teach English? EFL Pre-service Teachers’ Preparedness for Teaching
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Abstract
The purpose of the study was to investigate the nature of Turkish pre-service EFL teachers’ sense of preparedness for teaching. Their understanding of effective language teacher characteristics, their perceptions of their weaknesses and strengths, their insight into the factors that contributed to or inhibited their development as teachers, and their beliefs about the potential areas for development in the teacher education programs were scrutinized in the scope of the current research. The study was basically an exploratory case study that employed individual interviews with 10 pre-service EFL teachers being trained at a public university in Turkey. The content analysis of the interviews revealed seven themes: perceptions of a good language teacher, foreseen challenges, perceived strengths, empowering factors, perceived weaknesses, inhibiting factors, and suggestions. The participants of the research mainly believe that an effective language teacher should possess pedagogical skills, pedagogical knowledge, technological pedagogical skills, classroom management skills, and interpersonal skills. However, they cite their personality traits as their strong side for teaching and pedagogical skills as their main source of weakness. They also believe that what inhibited their development as effective language teachers were some aspects of the education they received in the teacher-training program. Finally, they made significant suggestions for the improvement of the teacher-training program such as more courses that integrate theory with practice, more opportunities for actual teaching practice, and a better student teaching system. Based on these findings, some implications for Turkish EFL teacher-training programs are presented.
Keywords
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