Claims of teacher learning and retrospective tracing of claimed events in video-mediated transnational virtual exchange interactions

Virtual exchange (VE) projects in pre-service language teacher education are increasingly being recognized as an innovative practice due to their affordances for providing teacher learning opportunities in technology-rich environments. This study aims to report these opportunities based on results from a VE project consisting of diverse teacher education activities, including lectures, webinars, asynchronous tasks, and synchronous video-mediated interactions. This project provides a medium for pre-service teachers to collaboratively design a lesson to be implemented in hybrid language learning environments. We specifically deal with the video-mediated interactions of the transnational groups of pre-service language teachers using multimodal conversation analysis (CA) as the research methodology and investigate VE phases to explore how their interactions become consequential for the final pedagogical design. The findings show that the pre-service teachers retrospectively orient to shared practices in the earlier phases of the VE project, and the deployment of retrospective orientation as an interactional resource creates interactional space for collaborative decision-making related to their pedagogical designs. We argue that tracking the video-mediated pedagogical interactions of the pre-service teachers using CA is a methodological innovation that allows researchers to collect interactional evidence for the emergent teacher learning opportunities. The findings bring new insights to the role of the technology-mediated settings (e.g. VEs and telecollaboration) in language learning, teaching, and teacher education and in bridging different cultures, curricula, and physical spaces.

Virtual Exchange projects in initial teacher education provide various professional development opportunities for the pre-service teachers. This study explores the reflection-in-action practices of the pre-service teachers in transnational teams while creating collaborative lesson plans in a trilateral Virtual Exchange project. By exclusively focusing on the screen-recordings of the video-mediated interactions of the pre-service teachers using multimodal Conversation Analysis as the research methodology, we display how the pre-service teachers engage in reflection-in-action over a pedagogical tool (i.e., Moodle) provided in the Virtual Exchange Project. We then show how they also use the interactional space afforded by reflection-in-action as a source for proposing a pedagogical design idea for their own collaborative lesson plans in situ. In doing so, the pre-service teachers benefit from the reflective environment provided by the Virtual Exchange to reach collaborative pedagogical decisions as a surface manifestation of their professional development and experiential teacher learning opportunities in-and-through video-mediated interactions.

Teachers' Sense of Efficacy: An Important Factor in School Improvement

In This Issue

In both the school environment and teacher education, sustainable development is usually linked to the natural and social sciences and is rarely incorporated into language education or encouraged as part of language teacher education. As more research is needed on the practical implementation of sustainable development in language teaching and language teacher education, this study elucidates Finnish pre-service language teachers’ perceptions of sustainability dimensions (i.e. ecological, economic, social, and cultural) and their role in language teaching. We used a questionnaire comprising open-ended and Likert-scale questions to examine pre-service language teachers’ perceptions of and attitudes towards themes under all sustainability dimensions, and their feeling about their ability to integrate them into their teaching. Pre-service teachers ( n = 26) recognized the importance of the social and cultural dimensions in language teaching and felt more capable of addressing personal environmental actions than global problems in the language classroom. Some pre-service teachers produced concrete practices linking sustainability issues with language teaching, but they were mostly teacher-centred. The pre-service teachers did not link equality as tightly to the cultural and social aspects of language teaching as they did in their personal lives. These findings help in developing language teaching and teacher education programmes toward the educational sustainable development goals. Moreover, the questionnaire can be used to analyse the consideration of sustainability themes in language teaching and language teacher education.

Background/Context: This paper explores how intersectionality and DisCrit can be used as analytic tools to scaffold preservice teachers’ ability to see the ways in which referrals to and services within special education reproduce inequities as a function of race and perceptions of ability that are rooted in White, middle-class, able-bodied norms. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This qualitative study analyzes White preservice teachers’ understanding and application of intersectionality and DisCrit. Applying critical theoretical perspectives, preservice teachers engage in identifying instances of oppression in society and schools and naming the resulting harm to Black students and families. This paper focuses on the following research questions: How do White preservice teachers engage with critical frameworks intended to unearth the impacts of racism and ableism on Black students? What do their responses reveal about preservice teachers’ level of critical consciousness? Population/Participants/Subjects: Participants in this study were preservice general education teachers in the last semester of coursework of an intensive 12-month master’s program in secondary education at a large predominantly White Midwestern university. This study focuses on four self-identified White able-bodied and one White (dis)abled preservice teacher who represent exemplars of the types of engagement evidenced by preservice teachers within the course. Intervention/Program/Practice: The course that was the site of this study focused on preparing preservice teachers to teach and support Students Identified with (Dis)abilities in middle and high school classrooms. The first portion of the course focused on analyzing the history of racism and ableism in special education using critical frameworks. These class sessions provided preservice teachers with frameworks they could apply to their experiences at their school sites and language they needed to discuss racism and ableism. Research Design: This article reports on a qualitative case study of general education preservice teacher engagement with the critical frameworks of intersectionality and disability critical race theory (DisCrit) in a predominantly White teacher education program. Data Collection and Analysis: For the duration of the course, video recordings of whole group discussions and audio recordings of small group discussions were collected. Descriptive and in vivo coding were employed during the first level of coding to closely highlight participants’ perspectives that were rooted in their own language. The second level of analysis captured the content of the ideas expressed by preservice teachers when engaging and employing critical frameworks, and the third level of analysis captured preservice teacher engagement in ways that demonstrated either active adoption, quiet adoption, resistant engagement, or resistant deflection of course material. Findings/Results: There is a fluidity in which preservice teachers move through levels of engagement (active adoption, quiet adoption, resistant engagement, or resistant deflection) when explicitly taught critical frameworks to help them identify and disrupt inequity, in this case, racism and ableism in schools. For example, a preservice teacher may experience dissonance when there is misalignment between their previously held assumptions and new learning. At first, they may resist this knowledge and then adopt new perspectives over time. They may also go back and forth between resistance and adoption, or they may remain resistant throughout the course. Additionally, a preservice teacher may actively adopt course content and frameworks that align with their previous orientations and quietly or actively adopt new frameworks over time. Conclusions/Recommendations: Teaching critical frameworks is an important tool to understanding preservice teachers’ orientations toward inequity. Choosing critical frameworks that undergird teacher education courses supports the development of objectives that are antiracist/antiableist. It also provides teacher educators guidance in choosing materials/artifacts that will encourage preservice teachers to discuss the implications of those frameworks. Critical frameworks provide a method of helping preservice teachers see inequity that aspects of their privilege render invisible and provide an assessment tool for teacher educators to analyze preservice teachers’ orientations toward inequity and how this manifests in their orientation toward students of historically marginalized groups.

The pandemic-related disruption to education worldwide has led pre-service language teacher education activities to go fully online. In order to benefit from the true affordances of distance modes of teacher education, diverse training models were put into practice. This chapter reports a case reflecting this state of the art and presents findings from a language teacher education project that includes asynchronous training of pre-service teachers on the concept of Classroom Interactional Competence and their synchronous video-mediated analytic discussions with peers oriented to actual teachers’ interactional practices based on short video clips. It specifically focuses on video-mediated peer interactions and describes how the pre-service teachers closely examine natural L2 teaching data. Drawing on Multimodal Conversation Analysis both as the research methodology and the teacher education perspective, this study primarily deals with the moments of peer disagreement oriented to certain teacher practices and the emergent pre-service teacher learning opportunities in doing so.

Telecollaborative exchanges between students from different countries are increasingly becoming a common practice in foreign language education and calling for new teacher competences for task design in order to maximize interactional opportunities in these settings. Considering that tasks are dynamic in nature and subject to constant change from their initial design to implementation by L2 learners, there is a need for teacher training activities promoting opportunities for improving the required digital and pedagogical competences. With this in mind, this paper sets out to explore the interactional architecture of the multiple steps involved in the training of pre-service language teachers in pedagogical task design for telecollaboration-oriented video-mediated interactional settings. We describe the procedural unfolding of the telecollaborative tasks by analyzing (i) pre-service teachers’ collaborative design meetings and (ii) written design reports; (iii) peer and mentor evaluation of these design ideas in whole-class feedback sessions in teacher training classrooms; (iv) written reports of redesigns after the feedback session, (v) video-mediated implementation by telecollaborative task participants, and finally (vi) pre-service teachers’ written reflections based on the implementation of their own designs. We use Conversation Analysis to closely examine audio and screen-recording data and draw on the textual data to present the procedural unfolding of two tasks over multiple phases, namely design, feedback, implementation, and reflection. The findings show that a telecollaborative task is a co-construction by the pre-service teachers as task designers, the teacher trainer as the mentor, and the L2 learners as the end users in interactionally trackable ways across the teacher education events. The results bring insights into the novel sets of digital, pedagogical, and interactional competencies in L2 contexts. We conclude that task enhanced telecollaboration holds great potential to critically advance research and practice in L2 teaching and teacher education worldwide.

Stage 1: Survival During Stage 1, which may last throughout the first full year of teaching, the teacher's main concern is whether she can survive. This preoccupation with survival may be expressed in questions the teacher asks: "Can I get through the day in one piece? Without losing a child? Can I make it until the end of the week? Until the next vacation? Can I really do this kind of work day after day? Will I be accepted by my colleagues?" Such questions are well expressed in Ryan's enlightening collection of accounts of first-year teaching experiences (3).

This study aims to gain insight into the perceived purpose and value of preservice teacher inquiry in Dutch primary teacher education by teacher educators and preservice teachers at the undergraduate level; it also assesses the implementation of teaching and learning activities, and learning outcomes associated with teacher inquiry. In the Netherlands, inquiry competence in primary teacher education develops over a 4-year period, resulting in students’ completion of capstone projects using practitioner inquiry. The authors combine a survey with focus groups of teacher educators and preservice teachers from eight institutes. They find differences between preservice teachers’ perceptions of the implementation of inquiry competence and teacher educators’ visions and perceptions of such implementation. All participants, students and educators, believe inquiry to be valuable and perceive learning outcomes of inquiry to be enriching, yet about half of the preservice teachers do not to expect to undertake inquiry in their future teaching jobs.

A video-based program on lesson analysis for pre-service mathematics teachers was implemented for two consecutive years as part of a teacher education program at the University of Lazio, Italy. Two questions were addressed: What can preservice teachers learn from the analysis of videotaped lessons? How can preservice teachers’ analysis ability, and its improvement, be measured? Two groups of preservice teachers (approximately 140 in total) participated in the program. A three-step lesson analysis framework was applied to three lesson videos: (1) goal(s) and parts of the lesson; (2) student learning; and, (3) teaching alternatives. Preservice teachers’ ability to analyze lessons was measured through an open-ended pre- and post-assessment. In the assessment, preservice teachers were asked to mark and comment on events (in a lesson not included in the program) that they found interesting for: teachers’ actions/decisions; students’ behavior/learning; and, mathematical content. A coding system was developed based on five criteria: elaboration, mathematics content, student learning, critical approach, and alternative strategies. In both studies, the ability to analyze instruction improved significantly on all five criteria. These data suggest promising directions for the development of both an instrument to measure lesson analysis abilities and a model for teacher learning.

This article explores the use of blogs for pre-service language teacher education in two national settings, the UK (University of Cambridge) and the US (University of South Florida). Taking two approaches to blogging and to learning through blogging (one based on self-reflection and a constructivist approach and one based on social and collaborative learning and a sociocultural approach), the research examines how pre-service language teachers both use and understand the affordances of blogs for their professional development. Data were collected from the participants' blog entries during their eight/nine month courses and from individual interviews conducted and analysed inductively. Some distinct themes emerged from the two settings. In the UK setting, there was deep analytical reflection on professional development, on professional identity and on change, with the participants perceiving the benefits of the blog to be the distance it provides from events and the cathartic effects of writing. In the US setting, findings suggest that the blog was used as a space for joint sharing of resources and ideas, and for co-constructive learning. Participants noted the affordances to be sharing information, developing professionalism and collaborative learning. While the approach to blogging was different in the two settings, the engagement in both was dialogic; the blogs functioned as a ‘thinking device’ that enhanced professional development. Their use may transfer from pre-service teachers' learning to their teaching.

In recent times, more attention has been directed towards identifying international trends and ‘best’ practice for assessing pre-service teachers’ classroom performance. Previous attempts to assess Oman’s preservice teachers were based on adopting a psychometric/measurement assessment practice, whereby performance was measured by grades. Such an approach, in recent times, has been viewed as being fundamentally flawed in its attempts to measure pre-service teachers’ classroom practices. This is primarily due to its inability to authentically assess teacher’s learning in the classroom setting. Further underpinning this problem, is that Omani pre-service teachers are expected to undertake an International English Language Testing System (commonly referred to as IELTS), as a measurement of their English proficiency. This approach is problematic, in principle, as it is positioned after graduation and therefore forms no connection to the pre-service teachers’ school experience nor does it add to quality teaching and assessment. This recent shift in thinking, as to the idea that educational assessment should be based on psychometric measurements and grades, has evolved into assessment practices which encourage the integration of assessment into the learning and teaching environment. This thesis is concerned with how the pre-service English Language teacher’s classroom performance is assessed in Oman. Drawing on the work of Gipps (1999, 2002), this thesis adopted a sociocultural perspective to investigate the phenomenon of assessment practices associated with evaluating pre-service teacher’s classroom performance during school-based professional experience (also known as teaching practicum). Understanding assessment practices from a sociocultural perspective and its current practices such as authentic assessment and Assessment for Learning (AfL) assists pre-service teachers to learn so as to become professional, qualified teachers. To achieve the aims of this study, the thesis adopted a qualitative hermeneutic phenomenology approach to investigate the assessment phenomenon and to gain a deep understanding from the key stakeholders involved in the phenomenon. To enable this, the data collected from three higher education institutions, namely Sultan Qaboos University (SQU), Rustaq-College of Applied Sciences (CAS) and Nizwa University and their participating schools. A range of different data sources obtained: assessment texts which position pre-service English Language teachers; three-series of interviews with the different stakeholders: three pre-service teachers, three cooperating teachers and four university supervisors to reveal their experiences; and observing the phenomenon in situ to triangulate with the aforementioned data. Implementing hermeneutic phenomenology, the obtained data analysed using two approaches: Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) so that the existing practices for assessing pre-service English language teachers’ classroom performance in Oman were captured. The analyses revealed that each institution has its assessment practices influenced by its socio-political structure, yet SQU, unlike Rustaq-CAS and Nizwa University, is distinguished in relation to its pre-determined set of professional standards for graduating teachers; explicit assessment criteria that are shared and discussed with pre-service teachers; collaboration between all stakeholders in the assessment process; a clearly defined role for the cooperating teacher as mentor; effective feedback provided to the pre-service teacher; using portfolios to record and document the pre-service teachers achievements; and effective self- and peer-assessment strategies. These practices are mostly experienced by stakeholders at SQU due to its international accreditation under the influence of the standards based on the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). The findings suggest that SQU assessment practices are more aligned with the indicators of international best practice, compared to that of Rustaq-CAS and Nizwa University. Similarly, SQU had a better understanding of assessment practices from a sociocultural perspective. This means that within the context of assessing pre-service teachers’ classroom performance in Oman, the findings are not about each higher education institution but about producing quality teacher graduates by reforming the Omani assessment practices. Having SQU as a model in Oman, the key recommendations for policy and practice from this study are to: 1) set a national professional standards for teachers; 2) have explicit assessment criteria that align with the professional standards; 3) share the assessment criteria for success between all stakeholders in the phenomenon; 4) strengthen the collaboration between schools and universities as well as university supervisors and cooperating teachers,5) make the role of the portfolio more explicit in terms of monitoring and enhancing pre-service teacher development and learning; 6) empower the cooperating teacher to provide a more meaningful mentoring role to pre-service teachers; 7) provide explicit training in effective peer and self-assessment strategies for pre-service teachers in the classroom context and 8) provide explicit training in understanding and delivering quality feedback on classroom performance for all stakeholders.

Recent years have witnessed an exponential growth in interest in teaching English to young learners (TEYL) across the world. Pivotally, there is some research focusing on in-class practices and teacher pedagogy on this issue, yet young learner teacher education has not been given much attention. Many teacher education programs in different countries prepare their pre-service teachers for young learners by offering TEYL courses without providing them with real classroom experiences. To this end, the researchers initiated a practicum project in which pre-service EFL teachers taught English to young learners besides taking the TEYL module at the university. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 21 participants, it was aimed to examine the effectiveness of a practicum-integrated TEYL teacher education program. The findings revealed that practicum provided teacher candidates with a range of benefits in terms of putting young learner knowledge into practice, developing teaching skills, designing age-appropriate lessons and materials, and gaining confidence with TEYL. Different from previous practicum-related studies, the current study showed that practicum helped pre-service teachers have clearer minds on their future careers and teaching contexts in that some participants would choose to work with older learners considering the distinctive characteristics of children. This study offers implications for pre-service teachers and teacher education programs for training young learner English teachers more effectively.

Recent years have witnessed an exponential growth in interest in teaching English to young learners (TEYL) across the world. Pivotally, there is some research focusing on in-class practices and teacher pedagogy on this issue, yet young learner teacher education has not been given much attention. Many teacher education programs in different countries prepare their pre-service teachers for young learners by offering TEYL courses without providing them with real classroom experiences. To this end, the researchers initiated a practicum project in which pre-service EFL teachers taught English to young learners besides taking the TEYL module at the university. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 21 participants, it was aimed to examine the effectiveness of a practicum-integrated TEYL teacher education program. The findings revealed that practicum provided teacher candidates with a range of benefits in terms of putting young learner knowledge into practice, developing teaching skills, designing age-appropriate lessons and materials, and gaining confidence with TEYL. Different from previous practicum-related studies, the current study showed that practicum helped pre-service teachers have clearer minds on their future careers and teaching contexts in that some participants would choose to work with older learners considering the distinctive characteristics of children. This study offers implications for pre-service teachers and teacher education programs for training young learner English teachers more effectively.