A Head-Start to Teaching: Exploring the Early Field Experiences in Pre-service EFL Education in Turkey

This study explored the experiences of pre-service English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers, cooperating teachers, and university collaborators in a structured early field experience course. Qualitative methodology including data sources of interviews, observations, focus groups, audio and video recordings were used. The results of the study indicated that the exposure of pre-service teachers into real school contexts provided them with the necessary foundations of becoming reflective practitioners. The benefits of the structured early field experiences outweighed the challenges. Early field experiences are critical in forming the pre-service teacher beliefs and philosophies of pre-service teachers, so they should be designed carefully to meet their needs