Prospective Teacher Educators\u27 Knowledge Development Through the Creation of Multimedia Case Studies of Practice

Despite the importance of teacher educators in influencing the quality of teacher education and by extension, the teacher quality, teacher educator preparation and professional development has received little attention from researchers and its pedagogical knowledge domain is often generalized from that of teachers. This study therefore explored the knowledge development of prospective teacher educators through creating multimedia case studies of practice. The study was based on the analysis of data collected previously through a teacher development experiment with eighteen prospective teacher educators during a two-semester course for doctoral students in several teacher education programs. I adopted Cochran-Smith and Lytle\u27s theorizing about relationships of knowledge and practice that makes distinctions among three prominent conceptions of teacher learning - Knowledge-for-practice, knowledge-in-practice, and knowledge-of-practice – to describe essential knowledge for teacher educators. I used the constructivist grounded theory approach as a data analysis strategy to explore the participants\u27 experience in creating multimedia case studies to develop theories that were useful to understanding their knowledge development. The results revealed that through the creation of multimedia case studies of practice, the prospective teacher educators developed greater appreciation of the complexity of teaching and learning, appreciated the importance of reflection as a task of teaching and learning, got the opportunities to think in new ways about their own learning and developed better understanding of linking theory and practice. The pedagogical implications of these findings generally indicate that prospective teacher educators need professional development opportunities that would lead them to confront and break their previously held conceptions about teaching and learning while embracing research-based developments in education. Key words: prospective teacher educators, knowledge development, multimedia case studie

Exploring learners\u27 perspectives on oral error correction in a secondary school in Kenya

Error correction has been a contentious issue in second language teaching for long. While some view it as a natural part of the second language learning process that facilitates learning, others view it as a source of feeling of anxiety, apprehension and nervousness that exert a potentially negative and detrimental effect on learning the target language. Despite this contention, error correction is an actuality of second language pedagogical practice in the school setting and is mainly influenced by teachers’ beliefs. At times these teacher beliefs come into conflict with learners’ perspectives. This mismatch can be detrimental to learning thus a need for firm understanding of learners’ perspectives. This study has therefore attempted to investigate the learners’ perspective on error correction. The study adopted a qualitative approach, and the research participants were two teachers of English and twenty nine students of form three. The study used qualitative data collection methods including observations, the qualitative semi-structured interview format, the focus group discussion technique, and the nominal group technique to investigate the issue. The findings of this study indicate that leaners prefer all their errors to be corrected by the teacher immediately following the ill-formed utterance rather than at the end of the lesson. Although the findings revealed that the learners prefer explicit correction, the use of metalinguistic feedback emerged as probably the most beneficial type of correction to the students. The pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed, top among them being that teachers should embrace correction strategies that provide students with clues for them to generate their own repair such as metalinguistic feedback while shunning strategies that simply give the student the correct answer