Abstract:

Prospective teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) have to take compulsory and elective courses that are more than 150 credits for graduation from bachelor degree programs in Turkey. At least ten of such courses target the development of pre-service teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge on teaching and testing of related methodology. It can be argued that by the end of this program, students will be ready to teach four skills in their future classrooms; however, research on prospective teachers’ level of readiness is already at scarce. Having been trained on EFL instruction, the future practitioners’ degree of readiness to teach four basic skills, namely; reading, writing, speaking and listening, is an area of concern. Therefore, the scope of this study is to identify pre-service teachers’ degree of readiness to teach four basic skills of English. The qualitative data was collected from ten future teachers via semi-structured interviews that lasted for 50 to 60 minutes. The results indicate participants’ perceptions on level of readiness in relation to teaching of skills. The teaching of productive skills, especially the spoken skill was identified to be problematic by the prospective teachers planning to work at both private and state institutions.

Keywords:

Preservice teacher, level of readiness, English teaching.