Pre-Service Teachers' Progressive Reflective Practices Using Weekly Journals in an Action Research Project

Abstract

In general, action research refers to any systematic inquiry conducted by teacher researchers or other stakeholders in the teaching/learning environment to gather information about how teachers teach and how well their students learn (Mills, 2011). By being involved in action research, teachers can experience the opportunities for reflection to observe, evaluate, and reflect systematically on their classroom practices in order to promote understanding and self-awareness and to make changes when necessary (McDonough, 2006). In this sense, reflection is a strategic activity and is believed to support teachers' understandings of pedagogy as well as their ability to think flexibly and objectively about problems and

The use of reflective practice towards achieving effective English language teaching at primary schools

“…In relation to the first aspect of the research, the results portrayed that the teachers applied reflective practice to adjust and make changes to plan the lesson, during teaching and after teaching to reframe their teaching for future lesson [9,36,45]. Similar to Sua, et al [17] as well as Lee [36], the teachers in this study claimed that reflective activities support them to be more progressive and enable them to increase their teaching quality [2][3][4][5] but, the findings showed that, rather than practicing reflective practice on their own, the teachers need ample support from the school administration to improve their practices in schools [17].…”

“…In relation to the first aspect of the research, the results portrayed that the teachers applied reflective practice to adjust and make changes to plan the lesson, during teaching and after teaching to reframe their teaching for future lesson [9,36,45]. Similar to Sua, et al [17] as well as Lee [36], the teachers in this study claimed that reflective activities support them to be more progressive and enable them to increase their teaching quality [2][3][4][5] but, the findings showed that, rather than practicing reflective practice on their own, the teachers need ample support from the school administration to improve their practices in schools [17]. The support and collaborative reflective activities [23] will motivate the teachers in implementing reflective activities in their teaching and learning process which could ease the teachers' stress in providing effective teaching [5,43] to increase students' learning performance and to fulfil the pedagogical, content and context demands [5,14] based on their own pace and significant to the context as suggested by Jejo and Haji [24].…”

“…In the current scenario, teaching English language as a second language is compulsory in Malaysia but English language teachers lack of reflective skills and they need guidelines to reflect critically to teach English language effectively [22,28,36]. At the same time, these non-native English language teachers also need to be competent in English language to teach lessons in Second Language setting [21].…”