EFL pre-service teachers' reflective teaching practices during their online pedagogical practicum

Abstract

This paper describes a research proposal performed within the Faculty of Sciences & Education at Distrital University. This study explores pre-service teachers’ reflective teaching practices during their online pedagogical practicum. The participants who took part in this study were student teachers from the last semesters enrolled in the last pedagogical practicum course and tutor teachers from a foreign languages program. The researcher decided to collect data based on three instruments of data collection: teacher journals, peer observation diaries, and a qualitative survey. The data obtained from these instruments were analyzed taking into account the levels of reflection framework proposed by Ozudogru (2021). The first phase of this research was focused on identifying student teachers’ reflective teaching practices and how they made sense of their first teaching experiences. Findings revealed that pre-service teachers made use of reflective teaching practices that were suggested by their tutor teachers. These different reflective teaching practices and the way these were structured allowed practitioners to reach deeper levels of reflection which made them make modifications to their teaching practice seeking to improve the English language learning process. This research showed the importance of reflective teaching within teacher education and the need to keep implementing these practices to improve English language teaching in Colombia.