| Teaching practicum has been highly recognized in initial teacher education(ITE)programs worldwide with a variety of advantages.Scholars at home and abroad have explored pre-service EFL teachers’initial teaching experiences from diverse perspectives,but research into their cognitive changes during and after the practicums is essential and still in its infancy.In this vein,it becomes considerably important to capture and present a holistic picture of pre-service EFL teachers’salient and nuanced cognitive changes and the underlying influencing elements.Given that teacher cognition research has attracted rising attention in recent years and remained underexplored,this qualitative quasi-longitudinal multiple case study aimed to investigate whether and how eight pre-service EFL teachers changed their teacher cognitions through group teaching practicums and which internal and external factors mediated their cognitive changes from the Vygotskian sociocultural lens.With the help of core theoretical concepts in sociocultural theory of mind,such as mediation,perezhivanie,the zone of proximal development,scientific concept and internalization,this study collected data mainly from stimulated recalls,semi-structured interviews,thinking-aloud protocols,classroom observation and reflective journals,aided by group discussion recordings and other material artifacts as the supplementary instruments.After both machine and manual transcription of the qualitative data,systematic coding schemes,thematic analysis,multimodal discourse analysis,constant-comparative method and a cross-case analysis were adopted to compare and contrast the two cases,the reading practicum group and the writing practicum group,and discover the themes and sub-themes.Significantly,four findings emerged from the data analysis.First of all,these pre-service EFL teachers’ cognitive changes include their varying complex ideas on teaching,teachers,learners,activities,materials and self.Second,their cognition and emotion as a unity revealed in perezhivanie could not be separated,while dramas or emotional dissonance could become growth points for their professional development.Third,their cognitive changes were influenced by internal factors including emotion and prior experience,and external factors including group work,experts’ scaffolding,teacher-student interaction,practice teaching opportunity,reading materials and video-based reflection.Finally,this study tries to update Borg’s(2006)conceptual model of language teacher cognition,integrate the emotion element and explore the complicated relationships among practice,emotion and cognition.This study contributes to the existing body of research on pre-service EFL teachers’ cognitive changes,expands our understanding of perezhivanie,updates the model discussing the relationship among cognition,emotion and practice,and utilizes examples to test its practicality.Pre-service teachers should notice their emotional changes in practice and become reflective learners.In addition,more group teaching practice and video-based reflection should be encouraged to help them correct mistakes and develop.Furthermore,teacher educators as important mediation in the process of pre-service teachers’ cognitive changes should provide timely and authoritative feedback.Future research can continue to investigate their cognitive changes across a longer timeframe to examine the continuity of teaching practice on their cognitive changes,involve teacher educators’ narratives and perspectives to reinforce multivoicedness,embrace multimodal discourse analysis to deliver dynamic and visualized classroom episodes,and further explore the academic value of perezhivanie in sociocultural theory of mind. |
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