Purpose The purpose of this paper is to touch upon the unaddressed points regarding the practice of lesson study (LS) in the field of language teacher development in a Turkish education context by considering the challenges faced and observed by the EFL teachers, their suggestions to design a process like LS practice and benefits that LS practice could provide them in terms of teaching and professional development. Design/methodology/approach The analysis is based on the data from five EFL teachers’ collaborative work in an arrangement of lesson and learning study and from the researcher’s observations during meetings and discussions throughout the process. The data consist of interviews with participant teachers (pre and post), video recordings of the teacher workshops, field notes of the researcher and video recordings of the research lessons. The analysis was carried out through content analysis beginning with listing the responses of participants, identifying the frequency of citations, collecting similar responses under a common category to determine the categories and at last placing codes into the related categories. Findings The results show that the teachers had some concerns about LS practice both before and after practicing the model in the study context. They stated their concerns mostly about time, increasing responsibility and effort, being a demanding process. However, the practice seemed to meet their expectations, lead to improvements in knowledge, teaching practices and perspectives, contribute to the personal and professional development of teachers and triggered enthusiasm and a desire for students to participate actively in learning process. Originality/value This paper serves as an explicit example of LS practice with its plus and minuses in a Turkish education context as teachers’ views and the researcher’s personal reflections in the current study can guide the process of change and provide evidence and practical suggestions on the feasibility of the program for the ones attempting to experience it. Besides, the teachers’ perceptions and suggestions regarding LS practice in the present study can enable other teachers, organizers of professional development programs and the researchers an opportunity to lead future practices.
This descriptive study, which adopts a mixed-methods approach, investigates whether the language learning component of the distance education program at a vocational school of higher education contributes to the students’ lifelong learning propensities, 21st-century skills and sustainability of their language education. A questionnaire eliciting answers from four standpoints were administered to students receiving English language instruction in the program. As for the qualitative side of the study, group interviews were held with volunteers. The quantitative data were analyzed by a statistical program while the interview data were subjected to content analysis. The findings reveal that although the students have a positive attitude toward language learning in a distance education program, they frequently refer to the need for the presence of a teacher for a variety of reasons. On the other hand, it appears that the requirements of the language component of the program contributed to the students’ plans for sustainability of their education after graduation. The results further indicate a need for more interaction and collaboration to be incorporated in the activities and that the philosophy underpinning the program, curriculum and materials need to be reconsidered to equip the students to compete with the dynamics of the educational world.
This documentary study analyses the levels of reflection in the reflective journals written by 59 ELT student teachers from a Turkish university upon their experiences at practice schools. During the practicum, each student teacher wrote four reflective journals on pre-determined topics for observation. The foci of journals were on the lesson observed, the mentor's classroom management strategies, classroom context and language, blackboard use and error correction. In this study, the journals were analyzed on the basis of Hattan and Smith's (1995) reflective writing styles and categorized under reflective models by Taggart and Wilson (2005). The analysis reveals that student teachers used a descriptive tone in writing their journals rather than a reflective one. The majority of the reflective statements used were in technical level followed by contextual level. In the journals, as compared to descriptions and reflections in technical and contextual levels, we detect rarer reflections in dialectical level. To shed more light to the study, interviews were held with eleven student teachers selected by convenience sampling method and the results of the analysis were discussed. Not being familiar with the word reflection, time constraint, lack of motivation, the nature of tasks and finally, distrust in the probability of supervisors' reading the journals were the reasons why the student teachers did not much care about how they wrote the journals.
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