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 theymoved from theory to practice.