Abstract
Abstract Language teachers in Turkey do not take a standard pre-service education as graduates of English Language Teaching (ELT), linguistics, and translation departments all end up with language teaching profession and this, in turn, results in different teaching needs and concerns. The researchers argue that these different concerns may be one of the underlying causes of chronic language education problems in Turkey, in that Turkish Ministry of National Education does not take into consideration the comparative picture of practicing teachers and composes curricula, teaching materials, and compulsory one-shot professional development activities that all reflect one size fits all ideology. Therefore, determining the needs and concerns of pre-service language teachers is of vital importance. The current study has arisen from Griffith’s (2012) call for more larger-scale studies on teacher concerns across different contexts via triangulation. The researchers aim at not only investigating teacher concerns but also painting a much detailed comparative picture between ELT and linguistics department prospective teachers. The researchers target convenience sampling, in the full knowledge that this group will not represent the whole population. However, this type of non-probability sampling can serve well when it is easy to gather much informative data. Building on the recent work of Griffiths (2012), the researchers have modified and extended the existing measurement tool of Griffiths (2012) to investigate the issue much deeper and compensate the caveats. They adapted her instrument and asked the participants to add their thoughts as well as deciding their concern level. The results are mainly in line with the referred study in terms of the rating and frequency. The study reveals that there are some differences between the concerns of ELT department students and language and literature department students. While prospective teachers studying at the ELTdepartment were found to be highly concerned about technology, their counterparts studying at the langauge and literature department were not interested in the issue. The study also reveals that despite EIL’s large space in the literature (Cogo, 2012; Sowden, 2012), it was not found as a major concern for the prospective teachers. Methodology was also the least rated concern for the prospective teachers at both departments on the contrary to the well-accepted literature.
Highlights
Researching teacher beliefs, concerns and perceptions has gained much room in the related literature as their beliefs are seen vital to understand their classroom applications. Donaghue (2003) best explains this urgency when she writes that uncovering teachers’ beliefs, concerns, and assumptions are necessary to encourage teachers to start change process by reflecting on their practices
The researchers aim at investigating teacher concerns and depicting a detailed comparative picture of prospective teachers studying at English Language Teaching (ELT) and language and linguistics department
The results enable the researchers conclude that prospective teachers are deeply interested in issues such as content, classroom issues, professional development, and technology
Summary
Researching teacher beliefs, concerns and perceptions has gained much room in the related literature as their beliefs are seen vital to understand their classroom applications. Donaghue (2003) best explains this urgency when she writes that uncovering teachers’ beliefs, concerns, and assumptions are necessary to encourage teachers to start change process by reflecting on their practices. Donaghue (2003) best explains this urgency when she writes that uncovering teachers’ beliefs, concerns, and assumptions are necessary to encourage teachers to start change process by reflecting on their practices. As these beliefs are believed to shape teaching practices, their sources should be revealed to encourage the practitioner to think about what they have been doing in their own classrooms. Beliefs are important as “there is often a great difference in teacher development between input (from the trainer/expert), uptake (elements which participants find interesting and consider transferable to classrooms, i.e. which match their own theory), and output (what is implemented in the participants’ classes)” (p.344). Exploring the sources of this paradox could serve well for consistency among these three elements, and smooth the way for teacher development
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