COLLABORATIVE INQUIRY GROUP AS MEDIATOR FOR PROSPECTIVE TESOL TEACHERS TO LEARN TO TEACH

The significance of practical teaching experiences in TESOL teacher preparation has been widely acknowledged. However, it remains unclear as to the best way to organize practical teaching experience. Following sociocultural paradigm, teachers are viewed as active agents who shape and are shaped by the activity of teaching. And what teachers know about teaching is experiential and socially constructed out of classroom practice. Accordingly, teaching is recognized as a socially constructed activity that requires the interpretation and negotiation of meaning embedded within situation, social and cultural contexts.
This research was carried out to examine the problems and resolutions shared and distributed in a collaborative inquiry group of four female prospective TESOL teachers, as well as how the inquiry group mediates these prospective teachers’ learning to teach English.Four female prospective English teachers at the ages of 22 and 23 attended a weekly-three-hour inquiry group when participated in a practicum teaching program for two consecutive semesters. The weekly inquiry group discussions were video-taped while at the same time the researcher carefully took notes during participant observation. Data collection of the study started at the very beginning of the student teacher recruitment period and continued till the end of the practicum teaching program; at the same time, early engagement with the data was carried out simultaneously with the aim of organizing the researcher’s field notes to show a precise identification of the developmental patterns. The analytical narrative data in the group discussions were constructed through identification of the topic shifts in the conversational discourse to discover meaningful patterns in the student teachers’ conversations and to arrive at the basic themes and how they were organized.
Results indicate that the prospective teachers examined the interactional dynamics involved in the process of teaching in classroom with a holistic approach. The interrelations and interactions among all the components of the teaching activity are the major concerns of prospective teachers the first time they enter the classroom. With the accumulation of time and experiences, they started recognizing the contradictions across different activity systems of practicum teaching, such as their past experiences as students and current experiences as teachers. The collaborative inquiry group functioned as a mediated activity within which prospective teachers develop themselves through object-regulated, other-regulated, and self-regulated means.
The discussions included in this paper highlight the concern dynamics of the inquiry group formed by prospective TESOL teachers, as well as the dilemmas and challenges they encounter throughout the practicum teaching. Results indicate that the prospective TESOL teachers, like experienced successful teachers, actively and continuously analyze their teaching with caring, applying a holistic approach. More studies embracing multiple perspectives from different research paradigms should be carried out in order to answer the fundamental questions, like how teacher education resources and interventions can be structured to support the teachers’ learning in a more appropriate and meaningful way.