PRE-SERVICE LANGUAGE TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF THEIR SKILLS

Teaching practices of students in English Language Teaching (ELT) programmes are an integral component of their training. In this presentation, I explore the experiences of 19 pre-service teachers in a public university in Mexico. Students of this programme have to complete a 10 weeks’ teaching practice period in different institutions before finishing their degree. Reflection can help pre-service teachers to realize their strengths and weaknesses, giving them space to think of new ways to face those challenges they may have during their practicum and consequently to feel more secure and confident (Schön 1983, Baird 1992). Participants’ perceptions were collected regarding the ELT training they received during their degree and how prepared they felt they were to face future professional demands. Reflection was the guiding principle in this study since pre-service teachers were asked to write a reflection diary to recognize the complexity of teaching and reflect about their teaching practice in the different institutions and levels of learners. Although pre-service teachers reported feeling confident and secure during their teaching practice, in their reflection journals they were able to express their concerns and fears more freely about their performance in the different institutions they were doing their practices. In general, pre-service teachers felt that their experience was positive and that they were learning a great deal from their peers, their students and their supervisors. Participants reported as strengths their skills on materials design, variety of activities, classroom management and effective use of voice. Also, they realise they needed more abilities in order to establish rapport, motivate their students and give instructions clearly. Reflection was a powerful tool for teachers to realise those areas they were strong in and those they needed to work on. One of the aspects that students faced most problems was in establishing rapport. It may be that pre-service teachers were young and not seen as real teachers by children or students and this fact interfered with the environment in classes. Results from this study allowed supervisors to determine students’ strengths and weaknesses in teaching as well as the areas they consider require improvement in the program and in pre-service teachers’ future performance. I hope that the analysis and conclusions made in this paper can be useful for supervisors to understand that it is important to give more support to pre-service teachers in the aspects of classroom management identified in this study in order to help them to achieve the desired results in the final stage of any ELT training programme.