Revealing Pre-service Foreign Language Teachers’ Imagined Professional Identity in Reflective Journals

Abstract

This study reports types of imagined identities that pre-service foreign language teachers construct during their preparation of becoming teachers in a pre-service course named Micro Teaching. This course specifically facilitates pre-service teachers to implement some theories of teaching in the previous semesters into practice. Revealing what kinds of teachers they imagine in the future is believed to have greater impact on the pre-service teachers' professional development (Chong & Low, 2009). The researcher analyzed 19 pre-service teachers' reflective journals to find out their imagined professional identities. The identities were then coded using the framework of imagined professional identity by Xu (2013) that fell into three categories: language expert, learning facilitator, and spiritual guide. The result showed that the three categories appeared in their reflective journals. However, the dominant imagined identity constructed throughout the semester was teachers as learning facilitators. It indicates that the pre-service teachers' concept of teaching is shifted from the traditional concept which emphasizes teacher control into recognition of self-initiated learning.

Factors Shaping EFL Preservice Teachers’ Identity Configuration

“…Attention should be paid to psts "imagined identities" (Barkhuizen et al, 2013;Iswandari, 2017;Xu, 2013) to explore whether those identities are finding a place in the real world. Those imagined identities are idealistic as imagination is endless, while their teaching experience has been limited to their incipient teaching practice.…”

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“…Unlike the more traditional point of view in teaching that highlights the transferring of knowledge, the Scientific Approach puts more emphasis on the discovery of knowledge (Ratnaningsih, 2017). Therefore, there are five stages that teachers need to implement based on the Scientific Approach principles, namely observing, questioning, experimenting, associating, and communicating (Hosnan, 2014;Azizah, et al, 2015). These five stages are performed in the teaching learning process in order to facilitate students in stimulating their intellectual development through student-centered learning activities (Ministry of Education and Culture, 2013).…”

“…Instead, further than that, students need to demonstrate the product built upon their understanding on certain concepts. In communicating stage, Hosnan (2014) emphasizes that students are expected to present the results of the conceptualization process in the form of spoken, written, or other uses of media. One example of activity in the communicating stage is when students present their findings or in front of the teacher and classmates, and other nonpresenting students are to give comments, advice, or any forms of feedback as a process of mutual learning.…”

“…In the implementation, K13 uses Scientific Approach as the main principle of the teaching-learning conduct (Abidin, 2014;Hosnan, 2014;Yani, 2014). According to Hosnan (2014), Scientific Approach is a learning process designed to make learners construct concepts actively through some steps namely observing, formulating problems and proposing hypotheses, gathering data, drawing conclusion, and finally communicating the new concepts that learners have found. In other words, in Scientific Approach, learners are engaged to construct knowledge actively through exploring various learning sources and teachers are not regarded as the only source of knowledge.…”

“…In the efforts to achieve the goals of K13, teachers are required to conduct the teaching-learning activities based on the five steps of Scientific Approach, namely observing, questioning, experimenting, associating, and communicating (Hosnan, 2014;Azizah, et al, 2015). The demand of applying the new approach has created a new challenge for teachers, as they are required to move from the traditional teaching paradigm to the more innovative one.…”