The Development of Reflective Practice among Novice English Language Teachers: The Role of Reflective Journals

Reflective teaching has proved to be one of the most important and influential approaches to teaching in second language teacher education. Although this approach has been the subject of numerous studies, in the majority of cases, such studies have been carried out cross-sectionally rather than longitudinally. To address this major problem, the present study, adopting a qualitative research tradition, investigated the development of the reflective practice among four novice English language teachers. The teachers were instructed in strategies employed for journal writing. Reflective journals were collected from each teacher within the time span of one year and were content analyzed. The results of the content analysis indicated that the participants' teaching practice improved gradually and developmentally in terms of both the type and depth of reflection. The findings urge the integration of the reflective practice, along with its tools and procedures, into teacher education courses/programs in different Iranian educational context.