Investigating EFL student teachers’ perceptions of self-study in the Saudi Arabian context

ABSTRACT

In the field of teacher education, self-study is often interpreted as studying by oneself. It refers to inquiries conducted by individual student teachers or groups of teachers working collaboratively to clearly understand the problems of teaching practice. Self-study has become popular in teacher education to encourage and advance student learning. Increased attention has been paid to its usefulness, yet little research provides an entire picture of how student teachers perceive it. Therefore, this study used five focus group interviews from a university in Saudi Arabia to investigate EFL student teachers’ perceptions of self-study. Interview data was compiled to reveal three representative themes of students’ self-study experience: Conducting self-study, sharing self-study with others, and learning from self-study findings. Results found that students acknowledged freedom of choice in obtaining enquiry data online, but were hesitant about sharing their creation processes of enquiries with others. Others preferred to receive guidance from a model, and some believed grades were more important than learning enhancements. It is essential to investigate students’ perceptions to obtain a more thorough understanding and allow the formulation of an effective framework implementing self-study.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-study
• teacher education
• English as a Foreign Language (EFL)
• higher education
• learning environment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.