To see or not to see: Professional vision of future English language teachers and of future elementary teachers with specialisation in English
Abstract
The aim of the empirical study is to investigate future English language teachers' professional vision. Attention will be paid mainly to the area of so called ability to notice, i.e. which domain general as well as domain specific phenomena do student teachers notice.
Furthermore we try to investigate the area of knowledge based reasoning, i.e. to uncover how they think about the identified phenomena. We shall focus on the differences in the nature of selected aspects of professional vision between future English language teachers of elementary and secondary level.
In the first part of the study, the concept of professional vision in the context of pre-service teacher education will be defined. Next part is devoted to the research itself, i.e. content analysis of unstructured reflections of students written after observing a video of English language teaching at a primary school.
The findings of the study suggest that the statistically significant difference between future English teachers for secondary schools (AJ2) and future English language teachers for elementary schools (AJ1) can only be identified in the students' ability to notice the category pupil. This category is consequently analysed with the aim to find out in which aspects do the two research groups differ.
The outcomes show that the main differences lie in the area of noticing the content, i.e. subject, and subject didactics, i.e. English language teaching methodology (AJ2) and classroom climate (AJ1).
Moreover, in the area of knowledge based reasoning they differ in the category evaluation (AJ1) and interpretation (AJ2).