The First Year in the Classroom: Crossing the Borderland from Being a Student to Being a Teacher

Challenges of First Years of Teaching in Turkey: Voices of Novice EFL Teachers

“…(ELT henceforth) (Farrell, 2009, Ferguson & Donno, 2003Freeman & Richards, 1996, Werbinska, 2011. As also noted by Farrell (2016), the scarcity of research on novice teachers in the field of TESOL is shocking, although this understanding is central if we are to help novice teachers successfully transition into their profession.…”

The Early Years of Teaching: A Cross-Cultural Study of Turkish and Polish Novice English Teachers

“…They tailored their own teaching techniques to context-bound conditions and critically reflected on the differences between teaching in their diverse conditions and their previous training. As a result, their suggestions could inform pre-service programmes especially in teaching multicultural and multi-level classrooms (Ben-Peretz & Flores, 2018;Cohen, 2010;Fantilli & McDougall, 2009;Kizilaslan, 2012;Madalinska-Michalak & Bavli, 2018, Werbinska, 2011. Bringing videos of various classrooms to practicum seminar lessons and discussing classroom problems were also reported to be effective, which resonates with Fantilli and McDougall's (2009), and Tavil and Güngör's (2016) work.…”

“…A number of studies indicate that the professional challenges in initial years of teaching include stress (Richards & Farrell, 2005), misunderstandings and isolation (Nias, 1996;Werbinska, 2011), teaching large classes, student demotivation, long working hours, (Madalinska-Michalak & Bavli, 2018), teaching English with limited resources, difficulties in curriculum implementation, rural teaching, and teachers' inadequate competences (Copland, Garton, & Burns, 2014;Kizilaslan, 2012). Teachers also express the need for more in-service professional development opportunities and activities consisting of more practical content and mentoring (Mann & Tang, 2012).…”

“…The research reported here is part of an Erasmus+ project which aims to encourage international cross-cultural research in second language teacher education. Although Turkish and Polish contexts include studies on novice teachers' reflections (Akcan, 2016), their experiences in initial years (Werbinska, 2011) and challenges of teaching English in Polish and Turkish context (Madalinska-Michalak & Bavli, 2018), this study contributes to the field in terms of comparing cross-cultural differences and similarities in the first years of teaching and transforming their local challenges into global opportunities for other contexts. As both countries remarkably differ in terms of history, religion, culture and socio-political background, we found it interesting to explore how novice teachers of English in Poland and Turkey respond to early-career teaching experiences.…”

Classroom-oriented Research

“…With hindsight, it can be said that for this study, which is focused on tracking changes, the most useful approach proved to be narrative inquiry, both written and spoken. Used widely in the field of applied linguistics to investigate motivation (Norton Pierce 1995;Schumann 1997), identity (Reis 2011), or teacher subjectivities (Werbińska 2011a), narrative inquiry can be very helpful in examining learners' beliefs, and instrumental in understanding who the subjects are and how they change over a period of time, allowing individual voices to be heard (Benson 2005). Constant observation of the subjects' behaviors, keeping notes in the researcher's diary, and then verification of the ideas with the subjects also proved to be invaluable.…”