Collaborative Inquiries into Teaching English Practical Skills via a Critical Friends Group

Abstract

From a sociocultural perspective, professional learning sites for teachers need to go beyond the boundaries of one-off training course to the situation-specific learning activities and on-going dialogues or collaboration among teachers within their community. Critical friends groups are one of the collaborative learning forms, which involve a small group of teachers within a shared teaching context and friendship to interact and develop professionally. However, limited empirical evidence was found about the learning process of those who are in their first years of teaching, known as novice teachers. This case study was carried out to investigate how five EFL novice teachers at a university in Vietnam made professional inquiries collaboratively in a critical friends group (CFG) in order to learn to teach English language skills. It aims at exploring the five teachers’ attitudes towards and constraints of their CFG experience. The data were collected through non-participant observations of discussions on a Messenger chat room of the CFG for three months and semi-structured interviews with the five teachers. The results reveal that the five novice teachers highly valued their collaborative learning opportunities with their critical friends in their process of learning to teach English language skills at a tertiary level while a number of hindrances were noticed in their learning within the CFG. Based on the findings of the research, it is recommended that CFGs or other collaborative forms of professional learning need to be encouraged among teachers, particularly those starting their teaching career.