Abstract:

The competencies to be developed by teachers in their pre-service training period require active learning approaches that can be adapted for replication once they start their in-service professional career.

This paper reports on the opinions of pre-service teachers enrolled in a Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) module about the organisation and impact of a challenge-based (CBL) and cooperative learning experience in their training.

Seventeen students who were enrolled in a module on TEFL within the MA in Secondary Education Teaching in Florida Universitària in Spain took part. They teamed up in groups of four or five people and each student became an expert on aspects related to learning foreign languages. Different pre-service teachers from other fields of study posed different questions on that topic and TEFL pre-service teachers provided the answers in face-to-face final sessions that included presentations and discussions.

The CBL & cooperative experience involved a lecturer’s and peer assessment of their presentations, a reflection of their own learning process in their topic of expertise and the implementation of the roles assigned in the team. Moreover, students scored their peers’ and their own performance during the whole project.

The participants’ perceptions were gathered from questionnaires and online interviews on the development of the whole experience.

Results suggest that EFL pre-service teachers found the contents to be learned tough and considered that this learning experience made them develop their professional competencies in a deeper extent if compared to more traditional methods; furthermore, they stated their confidence to implement similar experiences in their future professional practice in secondary and adult education.

Keywords:

Challenge-based learning, cooperative learning, Higher Education innovation, pre-service teacher education, TEFL.