Language teacher trainees’ sense of professional agency in practicum: cases from Turkey, Portugal and Poland

ABSTRACT

The concept of professional agency has recently been predominating in the field of teacher education. Despite this considerable attention given to exploring professional agency embedded in different contexts, there is still scarcity in research on teacher trainees’ agentic roles. To this end, this study focuses on exploring the impact of practicum teaching on the construction of a professional agency of teacher trainees in three countries. Eleven teacher trainees (four from Turkey, three from Poland and four from Portugal) prepared reflection reports responding to 12 open-ended questions focusing on factors that contribute to or detract professional agency. The reflection reports displayed supporting and detracting factors about professional agency as self-related (responsibility, perseverance and sense of belonging to the profession), mentor-related (rapport, modelling, being a team member and decision-making, constructive feedback, allowing adequate space) and classroom and student-related issues (authenticity, role in students’ eye, discipline and classroom management).

KEYWORDS:

• EFL teacher trainees
• teacher trainees
• practicum
• practice teaching
• professional agency

Acknowledgments

This article is produced as a part of the Erasmus + project titled ILTERG “International Language Teacher Education Research Group” (no: KA203-035295) funded by the Turkish National Agency. The study is conducted by Gazi University, Pomeranian University and the University of Evora as partners of the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Turkish National Agency [2016-1-TR01-KA203-035295].

Notes on contributors

Gonca Yangın Ekşi

Gonca Yangın Ekşi is an associate Professor at Gazi University ELT Department. Her research interests are teacher training, technology and language learning, culture and curriculum development.

Burçak Yılmaz Yakışık

Burçak Yılmaz Yakışık holds her PhD in English Language Teaching, Gazi University, School of Foreign Languages, Turkey. Her research areas cover learner variables, teacher training, teacher identity, sociocultural theory and assessment.

Asuman Aşık

Asuman Aşık holds her PhD degree from the Department of English Language Teaching, Gazi University, Turkey. Her research interests are corpora and language teaching, classroom discourse, young learners of English, teacher training, TPACK, technology and language teaching.

Fatima Nur Fişne

Fatima Nur Fişne is currently pursuing her PhD in English Language Teaching Department at Gazi University. Her research interests include English language assessment and evaluation, teaching English to young learners, and English language teacher education.

Dorota Werbińska

Dorota Werbińska is an associate professor at Pomeranian University, Department of English Studies. Her research interests focus on teacher education, mentoring, teacher identity, narrative studies.

Lili Cavalheiro

Lili Cavalheiro is a visiting assistant professor at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon where she is also a researcher at ULICES-University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies. Her research interests include ELF, ELT, teacher education and materials development.