Pre-service teacher training: motivation, objectives and teaching strategies

Abstract

Trinity College Diploma in TESOL offers a compulsory part of the course titled Unknown Language Learning Experience. It is an assessed part of the course and it accounts for 20% of the final mark. Trainees have to write a language journal guided by a semi- structured questionnaire after observing and participating in four lessons taught in an unknown language. The main objective of this experience is to introduce teaching methodologies and activities suitable for total beginners and to show how to write up a lesson plans and do a contrastive analysis. In 2003 we have organized a course on the island of Gran Canaria training 24 students from the UK, Australia and Spain. Eleven/twelve years after the experience, in 2015, we have asked them the very same questions they had to answer back in 2003 in their journals. This action research procedure has proven the validity of the unknown language experience. The questions we have analysed deal with feeling, motivation, teaching strategies, objectives and techniques. 100% of them valued the experience as a positive one and 40% of them stated that they could follow the lesson precisely because only L2 was used. 100% of the trainees said that they have used the same unknown language teaching strategies since they have considered them as a very useful in language teaching methodology. Due to the success of the experiment we have done trial experiments from 2011- 2013 at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria with the main aim to implement the Unknown Language Experience in the core curriculum at the Teacher Training Faculty. Keywords: L2, TESOL, journal, motivation, ULE