High levels of teaching-related anxiety may cause high levels of stress, failure and disappointment in pre-service teachers. The factors that increase anxiety and those that reduce it for student teachers might also be culture-specific. This study was conducted on 52 pre-service language teachers at a state university in Turkey during their practicum. Rather than investigating the anxiety levels of student teachers, the study aimed to find out the reason why they experienced, or did not experience anxiety with reference to culture specific reasons. This was done by focusing on factors that reduce or provoke practicum anxiety. A questionnaire comprising 25 open-ended questions was developed from the Student Teacher Anxiety Scale (STAS). The items in the scale were converted into questions and the participants were asked to clearly state why they felt anxious or easy. The responses were analysed through content analysis and then quantified to show frequencies. The findings indicated that the student teachers experienced anxiety due to the stress of being evaluated, as well as problem behaviour in the classroom. The results also revealed that helpful and supporting staff at the host school reduces teaching anxiety. The student teachers also felt at ease with a supervisor that they had a partnership with from the micro-teachings in their methodology courses through to supervision in their practicum. The findings are discussed and suggestions regarding improvement in practice teaching are suggested.

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Oral corrective feedback has attracted the attention of EFL teachers and researchers in recent decades. The current study aims to investigate EFL learners’ preferences and emotions about oral corrective feedback with a specific focus on gender and grade level at secondary education in Turkey. Quantitative research methods were used to reveal the findings.  664 EFL learners participated in the study at two different state high schools in Ankara, Turkey.  Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis tests were used to investigate the OCF preferences of EFL high school learners. It was revealed that more than half of the high school EFL learners worried about making mistakes in the classroom; however, the majority of the learners agreed on the necessity of receiving OCF and they had positive feelings for being given immediate feedback by their teachers. Regardless of gender and grade level, EFL learners had a higher preference for ‘self-correction’. Females preferred ‘metalinguistic clues’ as the first choice and ‘peer correction’ as the last choice among the OCF types whereas males prefer ‘peer correction’ as the first, but ‘metalinguistic clues’ as the last choice. Among the grade levels, 10th-grade level learners have more concerns about making mistakes and these learners prefer ‘clarification request’ and ‘repetition of error’ a lot more than the 9th-grade level learners.

Teacher agency is a concept that defines a teacher's commitments and capabilities of making decisions and taking actions which result in a change in the community of teaching (Husu & Toom, 2010; Pietarinen, Pyhälto & Soini, 2016). Since practicum teaching is the first place where teacher trainees enhance both theoretical and practical teaching experiences, it plays a crucial role in shaping teacher trainees' professional agency. Putting emphasis on the practicum teaching and different instructional backgrounds, this study aims to describe English language teacher trainees' sense of professional agency in practicum in Poland, Portugal, and Turkey. In addition, it attempts to compare three practicum settings in terms of the professional agency. The main findings of the study show that teacher trainees have a sense of professional agency in three countries but their level of agency varies. Considering the dynamics of agency, it can be stated that teacher trainees feel more agentic in reflection. Turkish and Portuguese practicum contexts show similarities in the components of reflection and positive interdependence; however, three countries significantly differ in the sense of professional agency from a holistic perspective.