Change in the Perceptions of Pre-Service Teachers as a Result of the Difficulties They Faced During Elt Practicum

Introduction This book focuses on how final year ELT pre-service teacher perceptions of teaching and learning English change as a result of the difficulties they face throughout their teaching practice period, at European University of Lefke in Northern Cyprus. This chapter provides background information to the particular topic and explains the aims of the study. In addition, information about the context of the study, definitions of the terms used throughout the thesis, and the limitations of the study are also presented. Finally, organisation of the thesis is outlined. 1.1 Background to the study Teacher education forms one of the most rapidly growing areas of research nowadays. In the globalised world, where English is used as an international language, the area of English language teacher education has also gained crucial importance. Studies pertaining to explore English language teaching and teachers who intend to teach English deal with various issues and all of these issues are somewhat connected to the education of English language teachers. To date, various studies have been carried out with different groups of English language teachers (e.g., pre-service, in-service, experienced). The pre-service teacher group, however, might be considered a different entity. As Harris (1991) and Debreli (2013) state, pre-service teachers are the group who are at the stage of experiencing the most challenges and difficulties compared to in-service or experienced teachers. According to Harris (1991), pre-service teachers enter classrooms today with high expectations of themselves and their students, as well as knowing that the first steps of teaching are difficult, and that over the course of their training or teaching, they experience a decreased strength of belief in their own efficiency and in the learning potential of students. Johnson (2006) links this decrease to the various difficulties pre-service teachers encounter in their professional development. _Johnson (2006) and Borg (2006) suggest that one of the most difficult challenges for pre-service teachers is how to use educational theories in their teaching practice. Many studies, for example, report that when pre-service teachers start their practice teaching, after a few teaching sessions, or while teaching, they face dilemmas or difficulties between what they have been taught, and what they actually experience in classrooms (Cabaroglu and Roberts, 2000; Johnson, 1996). Such difficulties, according to many, lead to changes in pre-service teacher perceptions of teaching and learning (Calderhead, 1996; Debreli, 2012; Erkmen, 2011). In other words, if a pre-service teacher perceives language teaching as means of teaching grammar inductively, and if he/she experiences teaching grammar deductively as difficult or problematic (which he/she was not aware of before their actual classroom experience), their perception of grammar teaching might change; perhaps to believing that grammar should be taught deductively (Hollingsworth, 2002; Altan, 2006). The difficulties pre-service teachers face during teaching practice, however, are usually considered unique to each pre-service teacher (Debreli, 2012), and are likely to be context-bound. In other words, although it might be said that every pre-service teacher of any subject area encounters difficulties when they start teaching practice, such issues should also be evaluated in terms of the contexts in which pre-service teachers participate (Richardson, 1997). For example, pre-service teachers of EFL are often found to have different problems compared to pre-service teachers of other subjects, such as those that are the result of their language proficiency level, which makes them more stressed and perhaps less self-confident when teaching (Borg, 2006; Calderhead, 1996).__ 1.2 Motivation for studying the particular research topic My interest in this topic arises from my own personal experience, gained when I first began working as a primary school teacher in Iraq in 1995. I graduated that year from the Teacher Preparation Institution (T.P.I) in Arbil, a city in Northern Iraq with a 3 Diploma in English language. I taught at two primary schools, a middle school and a high school in Rania city, for a period of eleven years in total. I believe that all pre-service teachers when they first practice their craft experience the same challenges and difficulties irrespective of where in the world they teach. In my particular circumstances, my challenges and difficulties were highlighted by my inexperience as a teacher and the lack of audio and visual aids. My greatest challenge was that the teaching protocols in place in my first school were in stark contrast to the teaching modules I had been taught at my T.P.I. Another difficulty I faced was overcrowded classrooms, which frequently consisted of fifty to sixty pupils. At the end of my teaching practice, and after receiving my tutor’s feedback, I had noticed that my perception of teaching had changed (i.e., I no longer believed in the effectiveness of specific language teaching techniques as I had before teaching practice). Such personal insights, since completing my undergraduate degree, have always prompted curiosity about whether every pre-service teacher with a similar educational background, faced the same difficulties and changes in their perceptions. I found an opportunity to conduct research on this issue during my master’s study, with the intention of providing valuable results to policy makers and teachers, to raise their awareness of what trainee teachers experience.