Reflection and teacher knowledge construction in English teaching practice

Abstract

The pre-service teacher education course is one of the most important places to construct teacher’s knowledge about language classrooms including foreign/second language learning and teaching theories. Some authors argue that this knowledge should be connected to a local knowledge, since external methods and practices developed by others may not fit the diversities of a distinct group of students within specific educational contexts surrounded by a particular sociocultural milieu (Birch, 2009). Teaching Practice, a common curricular component in teacher education courses, aims at inserting future teachers in educational contexts in order to recognize and reconstruct their pedagogical knowledge based on the diversities and adversities of educational contexts (Gebhard, 2009). This article aims at discussing part of the data collected in a qualitative research,which primary goal was to study the complexity of the process of reconstructing theoretical and practical knowledge in an EFL teacher education course. In this study, data collected through student-teachers’ questionnaires and their Teaching Practice reports will be discussed, in order to underst and the elements in student-teachers’ reflections about educational contexts and to identify the knowledge accessed during this reflective practice. Results indicated that during their formative experience in Teaching Practice, teacher candidates wereable to develop teaching skills and reconstruct their language teaching knowledge recognizing educational contexts’ particularities through reflective and collaborative practice.