Primary School Teacher Candidates’ Reflective Essays on the Categories That They Find Problematic When Teaching English at Primary Schools in Sweden
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http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/101839Identifiers
ISSN: 2336-6702
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- Číslo 1 [13]
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Issue Date
2018Publisher
Univerzita Karlova, Filozofická fakultaSource document
Studie z aplikované lingvistiky - Studies in Applied LinguisticsPeriodical publication year: 2018
Periodical Volume: 9
Periodical Issue: 1
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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/Keywords (English)
English as a foreign language (EFL), EFL teaching, teacher candidates, reflective essays, primary schoolThis article comprises a mixed-methods study of primary school teacher candidates’ (henceforth
participants) reflections associated with the categories that they find problematic when teaching
English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at primary schools in Sweden. In this study, the participants
are instructed to reflect on problematic areas of teaching EFL to young learners at Swedish primary
schools and present their ideas in the form of reflective essays written in the English language. The
reflective essays are written after the participants have completed their school practice sessions,
having taught EFL to the Years 4–6 at primary schools in Sweden. The participants’ reflective essays
are analysed by means of the software program WordSmith (Scott, 2012) in order to generate a list
of the most frequently used words. A qualitative component of the analysis involves the identification
of a set of categories associated with the problematic areas of EFL teaching in the Years 4–6 at
primary schools in Sweden. The results of the mixed-methods analysis reveal several problem areas,
e.g. pronunciation, spelling, irregular verbs, adjectives, articles, vocabulary, prepositions, etc.
These findings and their didactic implications for EFL teaching in the Years 4–6 at primary schools
are further presented and discussed in the article.