teaching practicum

Service-Learning (SL) has been internationally gaining in popularity in the field of teacher education in higher education thanks to its benefits. However, this pedagogical method is still new in some EFL higher education settings like Vietnam. This qualitative study investigates the undergraduate students’ attitudes after their implementation of an SL-integrated teaching practicum unit at some EFL community classes. In the study, seventy-eight fourth-year students of English in the pedagogy sector at a department of English of a university of foreign languages in Central Vietnam were involved as participants. They were guided to contact community learners of English, observe classes, design lesson plans, do micro-teachings, and finally write reflections. The findings from the reflections revealed that all of the students had positive attitudes towards SL and the teaching practicum unit, which made impacts on their personal growth, classroom management skills, profession, and community-related aspects. Recommendations concerning how to make SL and SL-integrated courses more effective were put forward at the end of the research study.

Since beliefs and emotions are involved in teachers’ daily professional life, this case study aimed to reveal the beliefs of pre-service teachers (PST) emotional strategies and the reasons underlying their beliefs during teaching practicum. Six PSTs from three Indonesian universities who conducted teaching practicum in three different school areas participated in this study. Fruitful data were gained from classroom observations, in-depth interviews, and journal entries. The findings reveal that Indonesian PSTs believe designing both a lesson plan and a second one is significant in preparing the classroom situation appropriately for students. These strategies can improve their self-confidence and motivation and help them regulate down emotions to respond to spontaneous incidents. They also believe in cognitive strategies that the students' problems and the teacher's weaknesses provoke the students' misbehavior. To up-positive emotion regulation, they believe in fake strategies showing their excitement and enthusiasm in teaching through verbal and nonverbal cues. However, hiding and avoiding emotions are not suitable due to harmful impacts. Hence, teachers have to unveil their emotions in appropriate situations. Teachers' attention to all students is pivotal for learning and growth. Thus, PSTs' emotional competence must be enhanced, for they have the ability to identify, analyze, regulate, and express emotions in the proper context and situation. The teacher education program must give PSTs full support by including emotional competence as one of the subjects or a part of the course contents to promote positive beliefs on emotion regulation