A Study On The Development Of Pre-service EFL Teachers’ Teaching Concepts Based On The Critical Incidents In The Practicum

With the development of researches on critical incidents,exploring the critical incidents in pre-service teacher’ internship has become a new perspective of teacher training and teaching research in the field of teacher education at home and abroad in recent years.The critical incidents in the practicum can strengthen or conflict with pre-service teachers’ original educational cognition.As a kind of educational cognition,teacher’s teaching concept is not a settled but dynamic concept,which develops and changes in the constant collision between theory and practice.Therefore,it is of great importance to help pre-service teachers form positive teaching concepts by exploring the changes or development of their teaching concepts.However,the existing researches mainly focus on critical incidents in the practicum and the development of pre-service teachers’ teaching concepts separately,and there are few researches exploring the development or changes of pre-service teachers’ teaching concepts based on internship critical incidents.Therefore,to explore the influence of critical incidents on pre-service teachers’ teaching concepts provides a new idea for the author to explore the development or changes of pre-service EFL(English as a foreign language)teachers’ teaching concepts.Starting from this new perspective,this study aims to explore the development or changes of pre-service EFL teachers’ teaching concepts via analyzing the critical incidents they experienced in the practicum.Then,this study analyzes the factors in critical incidents that contribute to the development.Finally the study discusses the implications to improve the educational practice system and help pre-service EFL teachers form positive and scientific teaching concepts.In order to achieve the above goals,this study specifically focuses on the following three questions:1.What kinds of critical incidents have pre-service EFL teachers experienced during their practicum?2.How do pre-service EFL teachers’ teaching concepts develop based on the critical incidents?3.What factors in critical incidents contribute to the development of pre-service EFL teachers’ teaching concepts?In order to solve the above questions,this study selects three pre-service EFL teachers of a key normal university who will graduate in 2019 as the participants,and intends to explore the development or changes of pre-service EFL teachers’ teaching concepts in the practicum by using the qualitative research methods,such as artifacts,classroom observation and individual interview.The research findings show that firstly,pre-service EFL teachers have experienced four types of critical incidents durin’g their internship:successful events;frustrating events;inspiring events and touching events,and they experience inspiring events most in this study.Secondly,the three pre-service EFL teachers’ teaching concepts have changed positively in different degrees by analyzing the critical incidents in the internship,and all of them have gone through the process from being doubt the feasibility of teaching concepts to affirm the feasibility and willing to implement them in their future teaching after experiencing these critical incidents.Thirdly,there are four factors of critical incidents contributing to the changes of pre-service EFL teachers’ teaching concepts:the environment of the practicum school;tutors in the practicum school;students in the practicum school;pre-service EFL teachers’ reflection.Based on the above findings,there are some suggestions to be put forward.First,the normal university should choose the practicum school carefully,establish a good relationship with them,and let them know and understand the expectations and requirements of practical education program.Second,the leaders of practicum schools should carefully select the internship mentors,and provide more opportunities for the pre-service EFL teachers to participate in various professional activities in the educational practice,such as classroom observation,practical teaching,recording critical incidents or reflective journal writing and so on.Finally,pre-service EFL teachers should build the habit of reflecting on teachers’ classroom teaching and their own teaching behaviors,so as to establish positive and scientific teaching concepts during the internship.