Understanding TESL pre-service teachers’ teaching experiences and challenges via post-practicum reflection forms

Novice Teachers’ Challenges and Survival: Where do Malaysian ESL Teachers Stand?

“…The local literature were reviewed and juxtaposed with significant scholarships about early teaching experience of novice teachers in other countries. Academic databases such as Web of Knowledge, ProQuest and JSTOR were used to obtain eighteen related literature [1,4,[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] and these include five local studies [22,23,24,25,26] about novice teachers in Malaysia. This article proceeds in three sections.…”

“…These findings are congruent with the findings from the study by [24] where mixed ability students and the use of mother tongue during English lesson as among the challenges faced by preservice teachers. Despite of these challenges, the participants in [25] study indicated positive comments regarding supports, guidance and cooperation they received from the school administrators, their mentors and their supervisors.…”

“…On the contrary, the study by [25] examines the similar challenges but involving 38 ESL trainee teacher who are mostly from China during their practicum in local secondary schools in Malaysia. Based on the findings, the main challenges faced by their trainee teachers were the cultural differences, applying from theory to practice especially on appropriate teaching methodology or strategy, students" discipline as well as the relationship with mentors and supervisors.…”

“…On the other hand, while the nationwide large-scale study [22] provide some general picture on the challenges that novice teachers from various fields faced during their first years, the study takes into account novice teachers from various disciplines thus, it does not describe precisely the challenges of ESL novice teachers in their first years of teaching English in Malaysia. Conversely, studies by [23,24,25] focus on ESL pre-service teachers rather than ESL novice teachers, and there are great differences between both groups as novice teachers have more teaching loads, professional responsibilities and given higher expectations as compared to ESL pre-service teachers who teach only in short duration of time during teaching practice. Therefore, there is a need to fill the existing gap in the current research by scrutinizing the challenges the ESL novice teachers face during their first years of teaching English in primary schools Malaysia.…”

Challenges in Practicum: Two Sides of the Coin

“…First of all, PTs perceive classroom management as a challenge in their practicum as this problem was also documented by many other studies (Murray-Harvey et al, 2000;Kabilan and Izzaham, 2008;Yunus et al, 2010;Gan, 2013). Since the practicum is the first time the PTs face with the students, they have difficulty in deciding on how to behave towards the students, how to deal with a problem occurred during their teaching.…”