Date

2015-09-11

Author

Çakmak, Melek
Gündüz, Müge

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The first year of teaching can be regarded as a challenging and testing time as teachers may face numerous problems (Huntly, 2008; Akyeampong & Lewin, 2002). In the present study, novice teachers are defined under two categories: student teachers and beginning teachers in their first five years as Lavigne (2014) defines in her study. First group of the participants of this study are novice teachers with maximum five years’ teaching experiences who have been enrolled in a graduate programme in Faculty of Education in two different universities in Ankara. Prospective teachers also take part in this study since they are considered to be novice teachers in literature. Moreover, it is believed that prospective teachers would contribute to this particular study to a great extend as they have already started to gain experience in real teaching context. In the data collection process initially novice teachers were asked to use log books for two weeks to write about their challenging incidents and moments during their teaching. Apart from log books participants were also interviewed. Focus group inerviews are conducted with prospective teachers whereas, indivual interviews were used with teachers. However, the log book did not work out as expected and the data came through were not sufficient. Therefore, only the interview data are analysed for the present study. The following questions are directed to novice teachers during the interviews in order to reflect on their challenging moments in order to reflect on their challenging moments: (1) Describe situations. (2) How did you experience the situations (3) How did you go forward / what were you thinking? What helped you? (4) What do you know about the result, how did it go?. The data was analysed through content analysis (Miles & Huberman, 1994; Strauss Corbin, 1998). The data analysis has not been finalised yet however, data analysed so far provides some remarkable outcomes. For instance, student teachers reflections reveal that they try to transfer their knowledge in real classroom context and deal the problems with the strategies based on their strategy repertoire gained in teacher education programme whereas, teachers reflections point out that they generally make effort to develop their own strategies for each case they experience. Awareness of the problems that novice teachers experience will allow us to think more deeply about adopting approaches that will help make their transition from novices to experts more smoothly and less problematically.

URI

http://www.eera-ecer.de/ecer-programmes/conference/20/contribution/36044/
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/77922

Collections

Department of Foreign Language Education, Conference / Seminar