Novice Language Teachers

Discusses the challenges and influences novice language teachers face when teaching in their first years. The volume outlines several detailed case studies of the experiences second/foreign language teachers during their first year of teaching in such contexts as the USA, Canada, Singapore, Cambodia, the UK, Italy, Europe, Hong Kong & Japan.

This edited volume provides novice teachers with a practical guide to help them transition from teacher education students to independent, reflective and autonomous classroom teachers. It also serves as a scaffolding tool for mentor teachers assigned to support novice teachers during their first years in the field. Novice teachers can use this comprehensive resource as a way to connect the overarching conceptual themes and big ideas from their Teacher Education courses to their classroom practices. This book is designed to encourage novice teachers to make more intentional and pedagogically sound decisions during their beginning teaching experiences, whether it is fieldwork observations, student teaching, or the first years in the classroom. The book covers a variety of issues, including: getting to know your students, families and communities; curriculum development; and pedagogical decisions. Each of these sections contain specific chapters devoted to a particular concept such as assessment, instruction for diversity, integrating technology across the curriculum, action research and more. This book serves as a bridge between pedagogical theory and the realities of the 21st century classroom.

A critical resource for pre-service and practicing teachers, this book addresses what happens when new teachers try to enact inquiry-based and dialogical pedagogy within standardized schools. Exploring the narratives from beginning ELA and humanities teachers when they encounter challenges and obstructions, this book explores moments of wobble—key events that called attention to practice in the context of inflexible schooling systems—that the teachers shared with their peers via an oral inquiry process (OIP) to help them unpack and understand their experiences. This book advocates for the continued use and enhancement of mentoring and induction initiatives, particularly those that recognize the expressed concerns of novice teachers, no matter what their pedagogical stance might be. By sharing novice teachers’ "wobble stories" and their outcomes, this book provides a pathway for teachers’ continued self-reflection and growth for the duration of their careers. The authors offer a reflective, adaptable, and easy-to-use process that places teachers in control of their own professional learning. The beliefs and structures examined in this text support the intentions of all teachers who work from a learning-centered perspective and wish to take some ownership of their professional development.

In their book, Othman and Senom provide a unique insight into the challenges faced by novice English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers and establish how mentoring can provide effective support for new teachers’ professional development. The book demonstrates the theoretical background for viewing mentoring as a process crucial to novice teachers’ development, particularly to the teachers’ ability to succeed and grow in a specific workplace environment. Using case studies from a Malaysian context, this book provides a comprehensive understanding of how mentoring can serve as a strategy to facilitate the transition of novice ESL teachers from a teacher education programme to life in real classrooms. Through its case studies, the book will examine both theoretical and practical issues for mentors, teacher educators, policymakers, and administrators when mentoring new ESL teachers. This book will be valuable to researchers who are particularly interested in exploring novice teachers’ identity development, and experienced teachers to help guide new teachers through the socialization process in their schools.

The purpose of this collection is to discuss the challenges and influences novice language teachers face when teaching in their first years. The volume outlines several detailed case studies of the experiences second/foreign language teachers during their first year of teaching in such diverse contexts as the USA, Canada, Singapore, Cambodia, the UK, Italy, southern Europe, Hong Kong, and Japan.

Inspiring to teachers of all experience levels, this guide uses humor and insight to show how to teach with daring, while growing through risk, reflection, and revision.

Guiding new teachers as they transition to the classroom

The chapters in the book present in-depth examination of novice teachers’ experiences in Houston area schools during their first-through-third year of teaching. Their professional challenges and the unique conditions in which they must navigate their developing and sometimes fragile teacher identity are comprehensively explored.

Leveraging the effectiveness of Concept-Based Language Instruction (C-BLI) in language teaching and learning, including in the teaching of specific linguistic features of target languages (Negueruela, 2003; Van Compernolle, 2012), pragmatic elements such as sarcasm (Kim & Lantolf, 2018), and even discipline-specific concepts (e.g., Casal, 2020; Kurtz, 2017; Yang & Sang, 2023), this project adds to the emerging scholarship on the use of C-BLI as a means of teacher professional development (Fogal, 2017; Lantolf & Esteve, 2019; Van Compernolle & Henery, 2015; Williams et al., 2013) and argues that C-BLI represents an effective pedagogical frame for language teacher development interventions for novice teachers. A pedagogical intervention was conducted through a course on teaching English as a Second Language, which connected pairs of novice teachers to an existing language course. Pairs were then assigned a target concept from the course syllabus (e.g., conditionals, intonation, tone and register). The intervention used C-BLI as a pedagogical frame through which novice teachers developed their target concept knowledge, created lesson plans, and taught a lesson in their partner course. The intervention also employed narrative inquiry and responsive mediation as means to bring about and mediate novice teacher conceptual development of the target concepts. Data collected consisted of narratives on prior language learning and teaching experiences, weekly reflections, meetings with the teacher educators, practice and actual teaching sessions, stimulated recalls, and final teaching reflections. The novice teachers' evolving conceptual knowledge of their target concepts, as well as the potential understanding and enactment of the principles of C-BLI in educational activity, were understood through both their sociocultural history and the mediational space created in the intervention by the teacher educators. Results from the case studies highlighted the potential benefit of employing C-BLI as a tool to mediate both conceptual understanding of target concepts and orientation to educational activity for novice language teacher teachers, as well as the importance of creating spaces for verbalization of evolving understandings in language teacher education courses. Further, results highlighted the importance of the teacher educator figure enacted as a responsive mediator to provoke and mediate novice teachers' development.

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