Perceptions of reflection on a pre-service primary teacher education programme in teaching English as a second language in an institute of teacher education in Malaysia

The practice of reflection is embedded in the curricula of pre-service teacher education programmes in many parts of the world, but there have been few studies into how the term ‘reflection’ is understood by those who are required to do it, namely, the student teachers themselves. This study seeks to redress this gap by investigating the perceptions of pre-service student teachers and teacher educators on the Bachelor of Teaching TESL programme in Malaysia of the meaning and practice of the term ‘reflection’ and the way this is manifested in the written reflections of the student teachers during their Teaching Practicum. The study will also shed some light on student teachers’ engagement with reflection through an analysis of their written reflections, and the support they are given on the programme. This study adopts a predominantly interpretive qualitative methodology in gathering and analysing the data, while a quantitative approach is used as part of the analysis of the written reflections. Interviews were conducted to explore the meaning of ‘reflection’ as perceived by the student teachers and teacher educators, while the written reflections of the student teachers were also collected and analysed inductively in order to understand how they engage in reflection during the practicum. The analysis of the data reveals that ‘reflection’ involves the student teachers primarily identifying their strengths and weaknesses in their lessons and providing suggestions for improvements (SWIS). The result is that their written reflections tend to adopt a fairly rigid structure. The SWIS framework also results in a very strong focus on the student teachers’ written reflections with a predominant, but arguably narrow, focus on issues related to teaching performance and classroom management, and comparatively little attention to other aspects of the classroom, such as learning, learners and their language use. I have termed this characteristic of their reflections ‘teaching-centric’. From the analysis of the written reflections, five features of their reflective writing emerge, namely ‘Evaluation’, ‘Reasoning’, ‘Self Realisation’, ‘Problem Solving’, and ‘Describing Events’. These features demonstrate student teachers’ engagement in their day-to-day practice of ‘reflection’. Furthermore, the analysis shows how five features of reflective writing were combined by the student teachers in different ways to form four identifiable ‘patterns of flow’, which I have classified as ‘Linear’, ‘Dominant’, ‘Recursive’ and ‘Random’. These patterns of flow illustrate student teachers’ engagement in reflective writing and have the potential to be a useful tool to develop student teachers’ skills of reflective writing in teaching. In terms of fulfilling the demands of the teacher education programme, arguably the support provided to the student teachers in reflective writing is arguably adequate, based on the reflective journals that the student teachers were able to produce. However, the textual analysis of the contents and the instructions in the course documents reveal that certain guidelines are fairly vague. In addition, the interviews with the teacher educators show that training student teachers in writing their reflections was limited to identifying SWIS. Therefore, the support provided to the student teachers in reflective writing is unsatisfactory and in need of improvement. An implication of the findings is that if teacher education programmes are serious about developing a language teaching methodology that is more ‘communicative’ and less ‘teacher centred’ than traditional approaches to teaching English in Malaysia, student teachers should be encouraged to reflect more widely, and their written reflections should move beyond the ‘SWIS’ framework to encompass areas such as the social, moral, ethical, cultural and political issues of their professional practice. Finally, the features of reflective writing identified in this study could be a useful guide to teacher educators of what constitutes good achievable practice among student teachers with limited teaching experience, and could serve a basis for developing appropriate, realistic frameworks for developing appropriate, realistic frameworks for developing and assessing student teachers’ reflective journals on their practicum

ÉCRITURE FÉMININE: Reconstructing Social Identity and Recontextualizing the Scripture

Book Review:Book title:Women, Islam and Everyday Life: Renegotiating Polygamy in Indonesia Author:Nina NurmilaNo. of Pages:xvii + 197Year:2010Publisher:Routledge, London and New Yor

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An Investigation of Price Movements During the Announcement of Acquisition News: the Case of Jakarta Stock Exchange

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Adat istiadat Daerah Bengkulu

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Analisa Perancangan Antena Omni Vertikal sebagai Transceiver Penguat Router Wifi dengan Frekuensi 2,4 Ghz

Omnidirectional antenna (Omni) is a type of antenna that has a pattern radiance whole or in all directions in the amount of 360 ° in the vertical position, as it has a beam thorough omni antenna does not have a coverage area that is too far away, then this antenna is more devoted to relations wireless communication indoors antenna which is paired to a wifi router that functioned as an amplifier reconfigured so this antenna will work as a transceiver amplifier with a working frequency of 2.4 GHz for wireless LAN (local area network). The parameters that must be considered in designing antennas for wireless LAN is working frequency, Input Impedance, SWR (Standing Wave Ratio) and Gain, and omni antenna designed to have input impedance parameter value 34.65 + J 7.24 ohms, the SWR 1.44 and Gain 8.32 dB. In the connectivity test used the command line via the command prompt provided by MS-DOS on a computer with a Windows-based operating system, and testing applications use power beam analyzer wifi version of Android-based smartphones. To test the speed of the download and upload, conducted through speedtest.net on two different networks that wifi.id network with download speeds of 15.22 Mbps, upload 10.48 Mbps network and the Faculty of Engineering at 1.09 Mbps download speed, upload 0.11 Mbps, which is influenced by the speed speedtest maximum value and minimum speeds provided by ISP (internet Service Provider)