Narrative inquiry study: Experiences and pedagogical reflections upon the pedagogical practices of an English pre-service teacher

Abstract

This study wants to portray a pre-service English teacher’s experiences during the teaching practicums of the Bachelor program in Teaching English as a Foreign Language at Universidad Santo Tomas, in three different moments: Pedagogical Practice V, Pedagogical Practice VI and Computer Assistance for Language (CALL). During this practicums it was necessary to give face to face and online English classes to children, adults and university students correspondingly. The experiences lived and the reflections made on each class were significant to enrich the role as a pre-service teacher in order to make visible the voice of the pre-service teacher and in this way empower the voices of their students by implementing a narrative inquiry. This narrative inquiry was done through narrative frames, semi-structure interviews and reflective journals. These instruments were useful to collect data related to the teaching and learning as a pre-service teacher. The data was coded using different colors to identify some patters in order to identify and find themes and subthemes. The main themes were: living the experience of teaching English to kids, living the experience of teaching English to adults and Living the experience of teaching to beginners through the mediation of ICT. Through this analysis also emerged other subthemes that helped to find relevant aspects to help the students in their learning process. This analysis offers meaningful and powerful experiences to enrich the labor as a pre- service teacher. For this reason, I would like to invite to all of you to continue doing narrative studies because it helps to enrich our labor as an English teacher taking into account the voice of the students to increase new pedagogical strategies to reinforce the learning process inside the classroom.

KEY WORDS: Narrative inquiry, pre-service teacher, pedagogical practices, learning experiences