reflective practice

It is utterly proclaimed that the effectiveness of teachers in their professional roles is deeply intertwined with psycho-emotional constructs such as reflective practice and immunity. Given the notable significance and scarcity of research on the correlation between reflective practices and immunity among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers, this study investigated whether Iranian EFL teachers' reflective practice exhibited a significant association with their immunity. To accomplish this objective, the convenience sampling method was employed to select a group of 204 EFL teachers (78 males and 126 females) from private language institutions across various provinces in Iran. Data were collected through surveys and subsequent interviews conducted with the participating teachers. The correlational analysis revealed significant positive relationships between teachers' immunity and all reflection subscales, except for critical reflection. The multiple regression analysis further confirmed that metacognitive and cognitive reflection strongly predict EFL teachers' immunity. Interviews emphasized the contribution of specific subcomponents of reflective practice to teachers' immunity. These findings emphasized the significance of merging reflective approaches and bolstering immunity within teacher growth schedules. Furthermore, they provided new opportunities to implement positive psychology criteria in foreign language teacher education.

Reflective practice, in the shape of post-teaching self-evaluations, is a core element of many pre-service English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher training programmes such as CELTA. Most research on reflective practice has been carried out with pre-service teachers, but more evidence is needed to understand the reflective practice of in-service ESL teachers. This study employed a Corpus-Linguistics tool called LancsBox to analyse the nature of reflective discourse found in 44 post-teaching self-evaluations, written by in-service L1-English ESL teachers, in a language school in Colombia. Corpus Linguistics techniques included frequency lists, keywords, ngrams, and concordances. Results suggest that in-service teachers tend to reflect upon the area of Subject Knowledge the most. Other frequent areas of reflection include Lesson Planning and Classroom Management. Areas such as Understanding Learners and Use of Learning Technologies seem far less important. Generally, the most salient reflective discourse type they produce is Factual, followed by Prudential and Evaluative discourse. The pedagogical implications of this study are threefold. First, both pre-service and in-service ESL teachers need to be taught how to reflect and this needs to be supported by teacher trainers. Second, to guide overall reflective practices, tools employed by pre- and in-service ESL teachers to reflect on their lessons could be adapted, so they mirror specific areas of reflection such as the teaching skills and reflective discourse types being evaluated. Third, the current study suggests a self-reflection tool pre- and in-service ESL teachers can use to assess and reflect on their own teaching practices.

Reflective practice and noticing can be regarded as two essential concerns for novice teachers’ survival and development in their first practices. Therefore, this study was an attempt to explore how reflective practices activate novice English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ noticing. To that end, we conducted an instrumental case study to explore the role of reflective practice among Iranian novice EFL teachers in activating their noticing. An inductive-deductive thematic analysis of the data collected through teachers’ portfolios and semi-structured interviews indicated that novice teachers’ noticing could be activated and sharpened through teachers’ personal, cognitive, and professional developments addressed by reflective practice. Furthermore, the findings showed that there are relationships among novice teachers’ personal, cognitive, and professional developments and the components of teacher noticing, including framing, perceptual activities and exploration, and interaction, leading to sharpening novice EFL teachers’ noticing. Hence, it can be concluded reflective practice can activate novice EFL teachers' noticing, impacting their professional development through framing, interaction, perceptual activities, and exploration. The study has implications for EFL teacher education programs, where teacher educators can help teachers develop critical reflection skills to address problems in their classrooms.

This study aims to investigate the effect of implementing self-reflection training on Iranian in-service EFL teachers’ beliefs and performance development. From all available participants teaching at the International College of Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Tehran, 20 in-service EFL teachers were involved in this study. The teacher’s belief questionnaire, observation checklist, and Skype app were used as the instruments to collect data. Before the training phase, the pre-tests, i.e., observation checklist and teacher’s belief questionnaire, were used for all the participants. The researchers utilized Skype App to instruct the participants in an online setting. During the training phase, participants were exposed to self-reflection practice. The instruction was done in 16 sessions twice a week for two months. After the training phase, the post-tests were run, i.e., the observation checklist and teachers’ belief questionnaire. The data analysis revealed that implementing the principles of self-reflective instruction had a statistically significant effect on Iranian in-service EFL teachers’ beliefs about their teaching practice efficacy and teaching performance development. This study has some implications that may help language teacher educators, English instructors, EFL/ESL learners, students, language curriculum program policymakers, and educational syllabus designers.

The present study aimed at investigating English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers’ level of reflection and the barriers to their reflection. To do so, based on an experimental research method, 98 EFL teachers were recruited and the English language teacher reflection inventory (ELTRI) was distributed among them. To consolidate the findings of the inventory, 20 volunteers from the same pool were interviewed.  As the next phase of the study, to investigate the barriers to the teachers’ reflectivity, the same participants were given an open-ended questionnaire to probe their ideas about barriers to reflective practice. Based on the obtained data and the related literature, a Barriers to Reflective Practice Questionnaire (BRPQ) was developed and distributed among the participants. To analyze the data, descriptive statistics, one sample t-test, and content analysis were employed. The findings revealed that EFL teachers did not practice reflection at high levels. They considered top-down curriculum, disrespect for teachers’ authority, teachers’ inclination to the conventional teaching practice, lack of appropriate context for reflection, teachers’ workload, and lack of appropriate training courses as the most important factors which bar their reflection. Teacher education programs should raise EFL teachers’ awareness regarding the concept and use of reflective practice.

Reflective Practice in ELT is the first book in a series entitled Reflective Practice in Language Education. As both the author of this introductory volume and the editor of the series, Farrell conceptualizes reflective practice and provides an overall image of the themes which the following books in the series are meant to discuss in-depth. The book is organized into seven chapters.

This article describes a collaborative and data-based reflective practice study carried out by two language teachers in a Japanese tertiary education context. This research utilized conversational analysis (CA) of audiorecorded classroom data which was subsequently discussed as part of a critical friendship. Both the inclusion of CA data and collegial discussion were in response to recent calls for increasingly data-led and dialogic reflective practice methods. In this study, the two teacher-researchers identified salient issues that they saw as incongruent with their stated teaching beliefs. They then collaboratively determined interventions to deal with the inconsistencies between their beliefs and their actual behavior and repeated the CA data collection and dialogic analysis phases. The two teachers found that the CA data and the opportunity to collaboratively interpret it provided valuable insights into their classroom practice while also offsetting the tendency for excessive self-criticism. This study provides a concrete example of a reflective practice approach that is both theoretically grounded and tied to bottom-up issues that are of interest to teachers.

Reflection and reflective practice have now become common terms used in teacher education and development programs worldwide. Reflective practice generally means that teachers subject their own beliefs and practices of teaching and learning English to speakers of other languages to a critical examination. The increase in popularity of reflective practice in the field of TESOL has also brought about an array of different definitions and approaches most of which however originate from the general education literature. Thus, Farrell (2015; 2019b) developed a holistic framework for TESOL teachers to reflect, that includes reflections on five different stages, the TESOL teachers’ philosophy, principles, theory, practice, and beyond practice. This paper outlines a case study of the reflections of a TESOL teacher through the lens of this framework for reflecting on practice. Overall, the results revealed that many of Lisa’s reflections in all five stages of the framework appear to be connected through two common themes: Teaching to students’ needs and goals and student engagement and rapport building.

Teachers use different tools and techniques to gain an understanding of the context in which the class is held in order to resolve problems through the process of reflection. In reflective practice, teachers observe their students’ reactions and the results of using a particular theory or technique in class and gather all their experiences in order to adapt or modify the theory chosen. In the process of reflection, teachers must relate teaching theory to teaching practice and observe the students’ responses regarding the findings of an appropriate theory or a technique. This paper focuses on the importance of reflective teaching and aims to introduce different perspectives involved in this issue.

The present study explored the development of language teacher immunity among Iranian in-service English as a Foreign/Second Language (EFL) teachers (N=15) working at public high schools. Drawing on semi-structured interview data, the study found that low self-confidence, students’ demotivation, low income, limited facilities, lack of enough time to teach English, parental expectations, and negative attitudes toward English were the main triggers of language teacher immunity among the participants. Reflecting on those disturbances, the participants employed certain coping strategies such as prior preparation, establishing a good rapport with learners, and exercising agency in providing required facilities and negotiating objectives with learners’ parents. The strategies adopted by the participants revealed that reflective practice should be an integrated undertaking involving reflection on personal, sociocultural, and educational factors rather than being limited to practice per se. The study introduced imposed maladaptive immunity as a transitional stage from exercising agency to setting into a state of complete indifference due to lack of support from macro-level educational policy makers. Finally, the study implied that language teacher education programs should raise EFL teachers’ awareness of the developmental stages of language teacher immunity as an integrated reflective practice.

This article presents how reflective practice is promoted through continuing professional development (CPD) workshops for pre- and in-service EFL teachers in Indonesia. The purpose of such workshops is threefold: to encourage teachers to take responsibility for their professional growth; to guide teachers in selecting specific aspects of practice for further development; and to stimulate teachers to reflect individually and collectively on the teaching-learning process to deliver successful lessons and maximise student learning. With this in mind, the current contribution starts by operationalising the concept of reflective practice and describing reflective practitioners. It also details when, how and why English language practitioners should engage in reflective practice. The article concludes with a set of useful activities that help transform English language teachers into reflective practitioners.

Reflective practice in TESOL is widely used in pre-service and in-service teacher education contexts and is regarded as beneficial for ongoing professional learning. While models of reflective language teaching vary, they all aim to improve classroom outcomes for teachers and students. A holistic approach to reflective practice includes teachers’ beliefs, philosophies and the interaction of their teaching practices with moral and social issues outside the classroom as part of the self-reflective teaching process (Farrell, 2015; Larrivee, 2000). Reflecting on the teaching journey in this way can help teachers make sense of how individual beliefs about teaching interact with professional experiences, and how these interactions inform decisions in the classroom. The aim of this narrative paper is to describe the developmental process I went through during my first year as a teacher of beginner, refugee-background students in an adult migrant English language teaching program in Australia. Self-reflective data primarily sourced from teaching journals kept during my first year of teaching were analysed using Farrell’s (2015) Framework for Reflecting on Practice. Following a brief introduction of the framework, its application to this current study is discussed. Findings highlight the important roles philosophy, theory, critical reflection and mentors played in my pedagogical decision- making and overall learning processes. The paper concludes with a discussion about implications for ESOL teachers, graduate students and educators in TESOL teacher education programs.

Reflective Teaching as a relatively new approach toward teaching and education can be traced back to Dewey’s (1933) assertion of reflective action. To date, methodologies remain almost recursive. Arguably, the modality of written genres may tempt the teachers to produce cursory reflective writings. This exploratory paper presents the sorts of linguistic stance resources such as boosters, hedges and attitude markers culled from one-hour case of spoken, peer reflection with three English practice teachers. Themes were analysed from these linguistic stance resources. Overall, the student-teachers’ reflection is enthused with a seesaw between force and conviction; mitigation, apprehensions, and misgivings of teaching-learning practices. Arguably, this pendulum results in the unstable positive and negative affective attitude about the teaching-learning process. Based on the themes, indicators for reflective practices were added to the reflective inventory designed by Akbari, Behzadpoor, and Dadvand (2010). Limitations, linguistic research trajectories and implications for mentoring are offered accordingly.

The present research aimed at investigating the interaction of the classroom talk to have a better understanding of the teachers’ practice teaching which can pave the way for reflection on teaching. The study benefitted from conversation analytic perspective to qualitatively and interpretively examine the classroom discourse of the teacher-learner interaction. The classroom talk was analyzed through conversation analysis perspective with taking the extracts of the learners’ and teacher’s interactions into account to see whether tasks paved the way for the learners to learn the target from through ‘Focus on Form’ approach. The findings could be beneficial for the practitioners in the field.

The field of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) is similar to other fields in that we must not take it for granted that novice teachers will survive their first year without some kind of support. This paper outlines how three novice ESL teachers in Canada survived their first year without any support from the school they were placed. Specifically, the paper outlines how they, with the aid of a facilitator, engaged in reflective practice by using a framework for reflecting on practice to help them navigate complex issues and challenges they faced during their first year of teaching. Had they not engaged in such structured reflection during their first year, they would have probably become another statistic of those who quit the profession and contribute to the growing perception that TESOL is a profession that eats its young. The paper suggests that language teacher educators and novice teachers should not just wait until their first year to learn the skills of reflective practice but should do so much earlier in their teacher education programs so that they can be better prepared for the transition from their teacher education programs to the first year of teaching.

Teachers can reflect on their practices by articulating and exploring incidents they consider critical to themselves or others. By talking about these critical incidents, teachers can make better sense of seemingly random experiences that occur in their teaching because they hold the real inside knowledge, especially personal intuitive knowledge, expertise and experience that is based on their accumulated years as language educators teaching in schools and classrooms. This paper is about one such critical incident analysis that an ESL teacher in Canada revealed to her critical friend and how both used McCabe’s (2002) narrative framework for analyzing an important critical incident that occurred in the teacher’s class.