Investigating Written Reflection and Its Relation to Language Teaching Strategy Change: A Self-study

Abstract

Reflection has received wide encouragement and adoption in the teacher education, and the teachers engaging in reflection are believed to be able to gain new insights into their teaching. As one of the prominent ways of reflection, written reflection is widely promoted in the teacher education of English Language Teaching. However, the relationship between reflection and improved teaching is still largely unclear and under-researched. This study focuses on teacher's written reflection and its relation to teaching practice change. It adopts a self-study lens to examine the Chinese researcher-participant's written reflections produced in the two microteaching sessions for an English teaching practicum course at a Canadian university, to investigate the role of written reflections in the researcher-participant's self-perceived teaching strategy change across the two microteaching sessions. The study identifies the researcher-participant's teaching strategy change: from teacher-centered method to student-centered method. It also finds that written reflection increases the researcher-participant's awareness of addressing the teaching issues and helps identify the core reason behind these issues, which motivates the researcher-participant to enact the teaching change and also provides the direction for the teaching change. This study provides practical implications for the encouragement of student-centered method in the teacher education of English language teaching.