Search results for: Teacher education courses

This exploratory action research study aims to understand the challenges that a group of pre-service teachers faced while participating in an undergraduate course unit introducing Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) teaching in an online context (Cycle 1), and the way in which they implemented plans of action (Cycle 2) to address issues uncovered in Cycle 1. The study found that the pre-service teachers experienced problems applying appropriate English teaching approaches to promote their pupils’ communicative competence. Four measures were applied in Cycle 2, such as restructuring the training-teaching module, reinforcing the concept of English as a lingua franca to promote students’ communicative skills, selecting authentic materials to enhance students’ motivation, and obtaining administrative support to resolve technological problems. The results from English proficiency tests showed that the pupils improved their reading and listening skills in Cycle 2. Although the actions taken in Cycle 2 were focused on improving pupils’ English abilities, these actions also had the effect of enhancing the pre-service teachers’ CLIL pedagogical concepts, such as the translanguaging approach. The study provides a detailed description of CLIL teaching with online storybooks and adds to the body of much-needed studies of CLIL in practice, especially in the Asian context.

This study utilised institutional ethnography to inquire into the lived experiences of 15 Australian pre-service teachers (PSTs) who completed an international professional experience in Indonesia. The PSTs were privy to a unique cultural experience, one grounded in an epistemological stance that differed considerably from their own. Despite completing substantial pre-service teacher education coursework prior to travelling to Indonesia, the PSTs became more acutely aware of how school students, teachers, and community members may operate from varied ways of knowing. As such, in this article the authors argue that international professional experiences have the possibility to guide PSTs towards newer and deeper explorations of epistemologies, a process of paramount importance in preparing future teachers to work effectively and appropriately in diverse classrooms.

This article reports on a case study that examined the teacher identity construction of preservice ESOL (English for speakers of other languages) teachers in a 13-month MATESOL program. The findings point out that the TCs negotiated their teacher identities throughout their teacher learning experiences in teacher education courses: 1) Throughout their teacher learning experiences in the activities offered in the IMP courses, they negotiated and enacted their emerging identities as ESOL teachers; 2) their professional interaction with other TCs through formal or informal conversations presented them with a dialogic space in which they framed and tried on their subject positions as ESOL teachers; 3) their simultaneous internship along with coursework was highlighted and acknowledged by their professors and peers, and the three TCs of IMP were positioned as experts of public school system.

This study examined second-language K–12 teachers' perceptions of the relative priority of conceptual teacher knowledge and procedural teacher knowledge. The data communicate a higher priority for procedural knowledge over conceptual knowledge. As is demonstrated in related studies, in-service teacher perspectives are nuanced on this issue.