Student-Teachers’ Perception of the Preparedness to Engage
in Online Teaching, and Challenges They Face When Teaching
Online: A Corpus Analysis of Their Reflexive Journal Entries
The Covid19 pandemic changed the way almost everything is done, including
teaching. Online teaching rose to become the quintessential way mode of
teaching in weeks after being in relative obscurity the two decades of its
existence. Online teaching is now prominent, but research shows that we are
still lacking knowledge in almost every human aspect involved in online
teaching. This study focusses on student-teachers’ perceptions of their own
preparedness to teach online and the challenges they face when teaching
online. This is done by looking into the primary keywords or concepts the
student-teachers use in their own writing. Language is our ubiquitous tool by
which we look into the minds of fellow human beings. Accordingly, this study
looks at a body of language (corpus) compiled from the reflective journals
produced by 23 student-teachers as part of their final assessment portfolio
(+700 pages, +800,000 words). These journals embody their thoughts during
their practical teaching experience. The analysis is carried out using a
concordancer program. By analysing this corpus, we will, (1) identify the most
prominently occurring content words, and (2) the most prominently occurring
words relative to the prominent keywords. The resulting semantic web will
display the concepts the preoccupy the concerns of these respondents thus
giving us an insight into possible areas that we need to focus on in our efforts
to remedy and enhance our online teaching capabilities. Initial findings show
that the most prominent word in their writing ‘students’ with technical and
technology concerns falling far behind
