THE IMPACT OF PRE-SERVICE REFLECTIVE TEACHER TRAINING ON IRANIAN TEACHER APPLICANTS’ ATTITUDES TOWARDS MAJOR ELT COMPONENTS

Reflective teaching entails a change in teachers’ attitudes towards major components of English language teaching (ELT) which might begin to emerge during a meticulously designed training program in which prospective teachers are actively engaged in various reflective activities. The aim of this study was to explore the impact of such a pre-service reflective teacher training course on 30 Iranian male and female teacher applicants’ attitudes towards five fundamental components of ELT. The participants had been recruited from 100 applicants based on their scores on a TOEFL PBT and a structured oral interview. A likert scale teachers’ belief questionnaire, designed based on the course content and piloted with a sample of 12 similar student teachers, was administered at the onset of the sixty-hour training course and after it was over. The questionnaire included five major sections eliciting teachers’ attitudes towards professionalism, teachers’ roles, lesson planning, learners’ roles and classroom management. The course comprised similar modules that were presented interactively by first raising questions, then offering a model for the participants to observe and evaluate and finally by assigning similar teaching demonstration tasks which were performed by individual participants and observed and evaluated collaboratively. Paired samples t-test of the data obtained indicated significant changes in the teachers’ attitudes towards some of ELT components. The findings highlight the need for reflective task-based teacher training courses that can actively engage teacher applicants in the reflective process of self/peer-evaluation and have significant implications for educators and teacher training organizations.