Moving From Theory to Practice: ELT Pre-service Teachers

This study was conducted to investigate the perceptual change in pre-service teachers’ effective teacher beliefs throughout their education in English Language Teaching (ELT) Department of which programme is constructed spirally from theoretical knowledge to the practical one. Throughout a data collection procedure lasted 5 academic terms, 80 pre-service teachers were asked to write their ideas about “the characteristics of an effective teacher”. In each time, as the pre-service teachers moved from theoretical courses to practical ones, the data obtained at each time was analyzed through content analysis and classified under 3 semantic groups; “content knowledge, classroom behaviours, academic qualities”. Results showed that pre-service teachers’ beliefs of effective teacher changed throughout their teacher education programme as they moved from theory to practice.


Introduction
One of the main objectives of teacher training programs is bringing out teachers who know both content knowledge well and the way of transmitting that knowledge to their students in an effective way. Herein, a growing body of research indicates that the effectiveness of instruction basically depend on pre-service teachers' held effective teacher beliefs. Thus, it can be inferred that along with content knowledge, teachers' beliefs have a significant role in terms of their influence on educational outcomes. Therefore, it is primarily important to understand pre-service teachers' beliefs beforehand so as to develop their educational outcomes in the field of teaching.
In the context of English language teacher training in Turkey, there is 4 year teacher education curriculum in education faculties which is organized spirally from theoretical courses to practical ones. More specifically, pre-service English teachers have met the theory of teaching in their sophomore year through "Approaches and Methods in ELT I-II" courses. Afterwards, in their junior year, pre-service English teachers take "ELT Methodology I-II" courses in which they practice teaching through microteaching technique in simulated classroom environment with their peers. Finally, they become ready to take their part in teaching profession after getting "School Experience" and "Practicum" courses enabling them to practice teaching in real class environment in a school under the guidance of a mentor teacher and a university supervisor. The organization of courses aims to carry pre-service teachers from theoretical methodology knowledge to practice step by step in order to help them gain insight towards teaching. The intention of instructors in teacher education program with that curriculum is to bring out effective teachers adorned not only with theory of teaching but also with the skill of applying theory into practice. Rather than the pure knowledge of teaching theory and its practices, through these courses, pre-service English teachers are supposed to develop their effective teacher beliefs, as well. However, the question whether this kind of organization helps pre-service English teachers to change their beliefs at the expense of being effective teachers should be questioned. Taking this concern into account, the present study aims to investigate the characteristics of effective teacher beliefs pre-service teachers which are supposed to be changed and developed through that spiral curriculum. Hence, the following questions guide the study: 1-What are the pre-service teachers' beliefs of effective teacher before knowing any theory of teaching? 2-What are the pre-service teachers' beliefs of effective teacher having learnt about the theory of teaching?
3-What are the pre-service teachers' beliefs of effective teacher after putting the theory of teaching into practice in a simulated classroom setting (via microteaching)? 4-What are the pre-service teachers' beliefs of effective teacher after practicing teaching in a real classroom setting?

Literature Review
The concept of belief itself is prominent as it "is a proposition which may be consciously or unconsciously held, is evaluative in that it is accepted as true by the individual, and is therefore imbued with emotive commitment; further, it serves as a guide to thought and behaviour" (Borg, 2001, p.186). Teacher belief, specifically, is defined by Borg (2001) as teachers' pedagogic belief or belief of relevance to an individual's. Moreover, teacher belief is defined as a teacher's attitudes about education-about schooling, teaching, learning, and students by Pajares (1992). At that point, teacher belief is not referred to general beliefs of teachers, rather to their beliefs about educational beliefs within the frames of their belief system (Pajares, 1992). That is, teacher belief as a very broad term also includes so many other educational beliefs that each of them may a subject of a new study; however, two main components closely related to the term teacher belief are content-specific beliefs and teacher self-efficacy beliefs (Pajares, 1992;Kagan, 1992). On one hand, content-specific beliefs which include beliefs about the epistemological knowledge of the field to be taught are significant for an effective teaching process as they have an impact on goal setting, choice of appropriate tasks and effectiveness of instruction of teachers. (Kagan 1992;Cheng at al. 2009).Schommer (1994, as cited in Cheng et al., 2009) posits two categories of epistemological knowledge: naïve and sophisticated. While sophisticated learners may believe that a vast amount of knowledge is evolving, some knowledge is to be discovered and very small amount of knowledge remain unchanged, naïve learners may believe that a vast amount of knowledge is certain, some knowledge to be discovered and very small amount of knowledge is changing. In that kind of distinction sophisticated learners are the ones who develop more flexible and critical thinking. Teacher self-efficacy belief, on the other hand, is teacher's belief in his or her capability to organize and execute courses of action required to successfully accomplish a specific teaching task in a particular context (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001). Teacher self-efficacy belief is also substantial as it is related with educational outcomes such as student achievement (Ross, 1992), and student motivation (Midgley, Feldlaufer, & Eccles, 1989). Considering that effective teaching is mediated with beliefs of teachers, it is important to help pre-service teachers enhance their beliefs to be more effective professionals in the field.
For this reason, one of the objectives of the teacher training is to modify these beliefs on the way to bring out effective teachers; however, it is a challenging goal to achieve for teacher education programmes as the pre-service teachers have a tendency to get the new knowledge of teaching through filtering it from their previous beliefs (Kagan, 1992;Pajares, 1992). It is also difficult to change the beliefs of the students who entered the teacher education faculty since they bring their beliefs about teaching which they get through their observation of their own teachers; that is called as "apprenticeship of observation" by Lortie (1975, as cited in Pajares, 1992Mattheoudakis, 2007;Cheng at al., 2009). Moreover, it is enounced by Rokeach (1968, as cited in Raths, 2001) that some beliefs are more important than others and the more important the belief is, the more difficult to change it. As Posner et al. (1982as cited in Kagan, 1992 note three steps should be followed to make differences in the previous beliefs, a) making students their implicit beliefs explicit, b) confronting students with the inadequacy or inconsistency of these beliefs, and c) giving opportunities to students to integrate or change their beliefs. In order to challenge beliefs of pre-service teachers, in that manner, may be considered primarily as they first experience teaching on scene. However, the effect of field experience period onto the pre-service teachers' beliefs of effective teaching has been hot-debated issue as it has no clear-cut consensus for either negative or positive impact of the practicum period on pre-service teachers' beliefs. In the study of tracking changes in pre-service English teacher beliefs in Greece, Mattheoudakis (2007) concluded that "student teachers" engagement in teaching practice did not have the expected impact on the development of their beliefs" (p. 1283). On the contrary, the study of Ng et al. (2009) indicates the possibility for teacher education programs to actively engage with their students' beliefs and to increase their students' efficacy by engagement. Furthermore, Atay (2008) concluded that the failure of increasing teachers' professional development is bound to ignorance of the situational factors affecting their classroom practices.

Context of the Study
The study was conducted in the context of ELT department of Mersin University which is a state university in the southern part of Turkey. ELT department is located in Education Faculty, and all departments in this faculty serve 4 year teacher training to their students. Specifically in ELT department, students may need to take a preparation class depending on their scores on proficiency exam which is conducted as soon as they enter the department. Throughout the main 4 years, the courses offered to students are the ones such as Approaches and Methods in ELT, Linguistics, English Literature, ELT Methodology, and Second Language Acquisition. Other than these kind of lecture based courses, students are also offered field experience courses of School Experience and Practicum. In the present study, the students of ELT department are named as pre-service English teachers as many of them plan to take their part in English education as teachers in the future.

Participants
The participants were pre-service teachers at ELT Department of Mersin University. As the study was conducted longitudinally, the participants participated into study at four different times in three years. The number of participants varied from time to time. According to this variance, the number of participants in each time is presented in Table 1. The age range of participants was between 20 and 26. Furthermore, English pre-service teachers who were the participants of the present study stated that they had no teaching experience outside the practices in the department.

Data Collection
The aim of the present study was to investigate pre-service English teachers' beliefs of effective teachers which were expected to be changed and developed while they were moving theory to practice. In an attempt to elicit effective teacher beliefs and perception of English pre-service teachers, the pre-service teachers were asked to write down their perception of "effective teacher", "average teacher", and "ineffective teacher" four times starting from their sophomore year to the end of the fall term of their senior year. Therefore, the data was collected in qualitative manner. The times when the data was collected from participants are shown in Figure 1. As it can be clearly seen on the Figure 1, the first data was collected at the beginning of the pre-service English teachers' sophomore year. This was the time when they had not met any theoretical knowledge of teaching considering that they would take "Approaches and Methods in ELT I-II" courses in the fall and spring term of their sophomore year. After they took these courses, they were supposed to learn theory of teaching, and Time 2 data collection was made at the end of spring term of their sophomore year. When they came to the end of spring term when Time 3 data collection was made, they took "ELT Methodology I-II" courses through which they practiced their theoretical knowledge via microteaching technique in a simulated class with their peers. Finally, Time 4 data was collected at the end of fall term of their senior year when they completed "School Experience" course which includes teaching practice in a real school under the guidance of a mentor teacher and a university supervisor.

Data Analysis
Parallel with the aim of the present study, the data was collected through pre-service English teachers own writings about the characteristics of "effective teacher", "average teacher", and "ineffective teacher" was analyzed through content analysis. In order to elicit the effective teacher beliefs of pre-service English teachers through their training in ELT department, their attributions about the qualification of these three kinds of teachers were counted four times in three years time. Each of their statement was handled as a construct and a construct pool was constituted. These statements were asked to classify into semantic groups by the 5 experts in the field. As a result, three semantic groups were emerged: content knowledge, classroom behaviors, and academic qualities. The constructs reflecting the subject-specific knowledge of pre-service teachers were grouped under content knowledge group. The semantic group of classroom behaviors included constructs about the teachers' acts in classroom. Lastly, the constructs regarding the personal characteristics of teachers were grouped under the semantic group of academic qualities. (All of the constructs that are gathered under these three semantic groups may be seen in Appendix). The frequency was counted for both sum of total constructs and sum of constructs for each semantic group each time. The frequency raised and decreased through time gives an idea about when and how there was a change in effective teacher beliefs and perception of pre-service English teachers.

Results and Discussion
Constructs of participants are obtained through their own wording of statements about characteristics of effective teacher, average teacher and ineffective teacher. When examined in each time, 100 constructs are sorted at Time 1, 105 constructs are sorted at Time 2, 106 constructs are sorted at Time 3, and finally the sum of constructs for Time 4 is 110. While a great deal of constructs remains concrete in all times, there are constructs added or deleted in each time. The sum of all constructs, the sum of constructs in all semantic groups in each time, the number of new constructs out of sum of constructs is shown in Table 2. As it is shown in Table 2, there were 7 constructs elicited in Time 1 for the semantic group of content knowledge. These 7 constructs seemed to be the ones that English pre-service teachers have before knowing the theory of teaching. After they took "Approaches and Methods I-II" courses in which they were supposed to have an idea about theory of teaching, there are 2 new constructs emerged from Time 1 to Time 2. These two constructs added were ( Lastly, 44 constructs were elicited for the group of academic qualities at Time 1. After English pre-service teachers got "Approaches and Methods I-II" courses, there were still 44 constructs at Time, but 4 constructs of these were new constructs, Namely, these constructs were (C108) "Being reflective to own teaching", (C109) "Giving importance to collaborative works of students", (C110) "Being flexible and eclectic", (C111) "Being reflective". When they practiced their teaching through microteaching technique at Time 3, there were 38 constructs; however there were no new constructs. At time 4, after they had chances to observe real teaching, 7 constructs were sorted as new constructs. These new constructs were (C137) "Being equal towards students", (C138) "Being tolerant", (C139) "Criticizing conditions all the time", (C140) "Being not tolerant", (C141) "Having lack of efficacy", (C142) "Being unequal towards students", and (C143) "Making assistants do own job".
Other than the semantic groups, the change occurring in the effective teacher beliefs of pre-service teachers can also be examined by looking the change of constructs longitudinally over sum of constructs. 100 constructs were sorted at Time 1 which had risen to 105 at Time 2. Out of these 105 constructs, 11 of them are new constructs that were added after pre-service English teachers learned the theory of teaching. These 11 constructs were distributed among three semantic groups as follows: 2 constructs for content knowledge, 5 constructs for classroom behaviors and 4 constructs academic qualities. From Time 2 to Time 3 indicating the process of pre-service English teachers' moving from theory to practice, 106 constructs were elicited 20 of which were new constructs. While there were no new constructs added to semantic groups of content knowledge and academic qualities, all of 20 new constructs were added for classroom behaviors. Finally, from Time 3 to Time 4, 110 constructs were found to be reflected effective teacher beliefs of pre-service English teachers out of which 12 new constructs were elicited. These 20 constructs were shared between semantic groups of classroom behaviors (5 new constructs) and academic qualities (7 new constructs) as there were no new constructs for content knowledge.
As it can be concluded from the results of the present study, there was a little change of effective teacher beliefs of pre-service English teachers as they followed a curriculum carrying them from theory to practice. The result of being a change in these beliefs is consistent with the study of Ng et al. (2009); however there being a slight change may be a result of that pre-service English teacher enter the professional development studies with internal and firm beliefs regarding effective teacher as they observe so many individuals in teaching profession (Kagan, 1992). Especially for the content knowledge, it seems that pre-service teachers had stable beliefs as only 2 constructs were added through their three years of education. What is remarkable in these results is the increase for the semantic group of classroom behaviors as the pre-service English teachers moved from theory to practice. It may be result of that they had chances to practice their teaching in front of their own peers and their instruction which challenged their beliefs as the challenging of beliefs is the prequisite for making a chance or reconstruction in the teachers' beliefs (Kagan 1992;Tillema, 2000). Moreover, pre-service teachers might have had chances to reflect on their teaching as result of the feedback they got from their instructor and their peers. As Tillema (2000) proposes reflective practice is a tool to make pre-service teachers learn to teach. Other from that, through practicing teaching, pre-service English teachers may become more aware of the classroom factors which include so many dimensions. When pre-service teachers of English observed a real class environment and a mentor teacher, they became more familiar with teacher characteristics.
To conclude, pre-service English teacher slightly changed their belief as they moved from theory to practice. Although positive change is an intended one in teacher training, this slight change clearly underlines the fact that prior beliefs of pre-service teachers are effective in shaping the new ones (Mansfield & Volet, 2010). Moreover, the increase in the beliefs related to classroom behaviors after pre-service English teachers teaching practices via microteaching technique is consistent with the studies that practice in the profession is an effective tool for belief change (Tillema, 2000). For more intended belief change, the field work by which students have chance practice work should be expanded in teacher training (Özgün-Koca & Şen, 2006).

Conclusion
It is a common fact that how teachers perceive themselves affects their teaching performance which in turn affects so many educational outcomes, primarily effective student learning. The main objective of teacher education institutions is to bring out teachers who can teach content knowledge with a skillful pedagogy effectively. In that sense, improving their beliefs towards being an effective teacher is the key point in teacher education. Taking that fact into consideration, in this longitudinal study, the change into students' perception of being an effective teacher is examined. With the present spiral curriculum of English teacher training institutions carrying pre-service teachers from theoretical knowledge to practicum, it is expected to achieve perceptual change of being an effective teacher. In order to see that expected change, data was gathered in a longitudinal way from pre-service teachers as they are going from theoretical knowledge to practice. Findings have shown that the beliefs of pre-service teachers about being an effective teacher have changed slightly via their course experience from theory to practice.

C3
Knowing best sides of approaches and methods and putting them n practice