Abstract:

Advances in technology and the shift in school students’ mindset require school teachers to modify traditional teaching practices. This means that new approaches to training pre-service teachers of a foreign language have to be applied, with problem-based, project-based and experiential learning being the most common among them.

The article describes the essence of experiential loop-input approach and analyses the effectiveness of its implementation in pre-service foreign language teacher training sessions. Loop-input is generally referred to as converging the process and the content of learning. Within pedagogical training the course material is expected to be presented through language-teaching methods that students themselves are supposed to utilize later in the classroom. Students act as schoolchildren and experience the same models of teaching that might be applied in their future professional activity. The relevance of the process to the target professional practices and of the contents to the current linguistic material aligning with the course and the year of studying is an essential feature of loop-input training. Before the students of the faculty of foreign languages of South Ural State Humanitarian-Pedagogical University start practicing their teaching skills at school, experiential learning is used extensively in teacher-training sessions. In order to intensify the students’ training process and enhance their awareness about various teaching methods and techniques, the loop-input model was introduced at the faculty in 2023. The model consists of several interrelated successive stages containing specific classroom tasks (both procreative and communicative) and language-teaching practices each of which is analyzed and decompressed during the final reflective stage.

The results of the carried out research prove experiential learning to be a highly successful method of preparing pre-service foreign language teachers for their future work, with cognitive, communicative, reflexive and motivational indicators significantly improved. Due to the loop-input involving a special stage of reflection and evaluation of the teaching strategies the participants have experienced they claim to process the course content more profoundly.

Keywords:

Pre-service foreign language teacher training, problem-based learning, project-based learning, experiential learning, loop input.