VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES NGUYỄN THỊ NGỌC STUDENT TEACHERS’ SELF-REPORTED CHALLENGES
DURING THE PRACTICUM
A QUALITATIVE STUDY Nghiên cứu định tính về những khó khăn của giáo sinh
trong thời gian thực tập sư phạm M.A Minor Programme Thesis

Field: English Teaching Methodology
Code: 60.14.10

A QUALITATIVE STUDY Nghiên cứu định tính về những khó khăn của giáo sinh
trong thời gian thực tập sư phạm M.A Minor Programme Thesis

Field: English Teaching Methodology
Code: 60.14.10
Supervisor: Lê Văn Canh, M.A
HANOI - 2010
iv
Table of contentS

3.1.2 Challenges in lesson planning 24 v
3.1.3 Challenges in using the blacboard 26
3.1.4 Challenges in classroom teaching 27
3.1.5 Challenges in the relationship with mentors 31
3.1.6 The need of a college supervisor in the practicum 33
3.1.7 The benefits of the practicum 35
Summary 36
Part c: conclusion 37
1. Conclusions 37
2. Suggestions for the Teacher Education Programme 37
3. Limitations of the Study 38
4. Suggestions for Futher Research 38

References……………………………………………………………………….39-44
Appendix 1: Guidance on writing diary during the practicum I

1

Part A: introduction

1. Rationale


2
practicum can inform changes which are to prepare the student teachers better by
narrowing the gap between the teacher education programme and the real teaching in the
school.

This study sets out to explore the challenges and tensions of the 5 student teachers
through their diaries written during the practicum.

2. Scope, Aims, Research Design and Significance of the Study
2.1 Aims of the study
The study aims at:
- Exploring the challenges of the 5 student teachers through their diaries
- Identifying the gaps between the existing teacher education programme and the reality
in the school context .
- Giving some suggestions for the improvement of the existing teacher education
programme.

2.2 Research Design
Given the aims of the study, which are to explore the challenges encountered by the
student teachers during the practicum, a qualitative design was employed. Data were collected
from the student teachers‟ diaries and follow-up interviews, and then analysed qualitatively in
order to find common challenges encountered by the student teachers participating in this
study. In addition to the common patterns of challenges, particulars were also attended to.

2.3 Scope of the study
The study limits itself to the investigation of the challenges of the student teachers
during their practicum. Information was collected from a small group of 5 student teachers‟
diaries and the follow-up interviews. The study is not intended to look into student teachers‟
classroom teaching practices. Nor is it intended to explore the benefits gained by the student

Part B:development 4

Chapter I: Literature review

This chapter reviews the literature on the practicum. It first discusses the role of the
practicum in the teacher education programme. Next, it reviews the challenges of the student
teachers during the practicum such as their relationship with the mentors or cooperating
teachers, and other challenges. Then the roles of mentors or cooperating teachers are
mentioned. Finally, the role of the supervisor in the practicum is reviewed.

1.1. The Practicum
If education plays a crucial role in developing the human capital required for the
economic and social growth of societies (Anamuah-Mensah, 2002), teachers play a decisive
role in this undertaking. Teacher quality constitutes a critical factor on which the quality of
the human capital depends. It is said that “if they [teachers] acquire the professional
competence and attitudes that enable them to effectively perform their multiple tasks in the
classroom, in the school and in the community, teachers become the single most important
contributing factor in ensuring quality educational provision” (Dave & Rajput, 2000).

how second language teachers learn to teach and how teacher preparation
programmes can effectively enhance this development process (p. 47)

This is also the aim of the present study, which is to find out the space for
improvement in the existing teacher education programme at Nghe An Teachers‟ College.

It is evident that the practicum provides a useful opportunity for student teachers to
learn to teach, to try applying the theories they have acquired from the teacher education
programmes into the real classroom. It also provides an opportunity for student teacher to
learn the practical teaching skills from the experienced teachers in the role of mentoring or
cooperating teachers. As discussed above, not only do the student teachers benefit the
practicum, but also the teacher education provider, i.e., the teacher education institution, can
also improve the quality of the programme through the feedback and the progress of the
student teachers during the practicum. Anamuah-Mensah (2002, p. 121) has pointed out that
the practicum is aimed at:
 Strengthening the development of specific teaching competencies;
 Providing opportunities for self reflection;
 Providing opportunities for sharing experiences with a mentor, supervisor and peers;
6
 Promoting problem solving capacity
and team skill in student teachers
and an appreciation of the life of the whole school as distinct from teaching in
individual classroom;
 Encourage formation of learning communities and promotion of team work;

7
teachers to make a connection between their acquired pedagogical knowledge or theories
of language learning and teaching and school practices.

Although the benefits of the practicum are evident, the student teachers, during the
practicum, may experience a lot of challenges such as the strange school environment, the
attitudes of the mentoring teachers, and the pressure from the students and from the school.
These challenges will be discussed in the following section.

1.2. The Challenges of the Practicum
The school where the practicum happens is usually a strange land to the student
teachers. Everything seems unpredictable to them. Therefore, student teachers embarking on
their practicum are likely to feel anxious about their new experiences. In order to overcome
those challenges, student teachers need to have the right attitude toward the practicum in
addition to their professional knowledge and skills. In this section I will review the literature
on some of the challenges student teachers face.

Wang and Odell (2002) identify three types of challenges that can confront student
teacher when learning to teach within the school context. These challenges include emotional
and psychological stress, lack of support, and conceptual struggles about teaching and
learning. Emotional and psychological stress is “widely assumed to be the result of the
relatively low professional status of teaching, the uncertainty of classroom life, and difficult
working condition” (p.514). Student teachers can experience high levels of stress during their
field experience because they face the challenges of carrying out two important tasks at the
same time: teaching and learning to teach. Emotional and psychological challenges may be
rooted in the student teachers‟ unrealistic expectations. For example, many student teachers
enter the practicum with hopes and inflated expectations that are often “shattered by exposure
to certain realities of schools, classroom, and teaching” (Knowles, Coles & Presswood, 1994,
p.109). In her case study, Johnson (1996) finds out that the tensions of the practicum are
rooted in the gap between the student teachers‟ vision and the reality of language teaching. In

of encouraging more discussion during feedback sessions in order to provide more learning
opportunities for student teachers. According to these researchers, evaluation of observed
lessons is a controversial issue. Their study also shows that trainee teachers preferred
numerical grades than just “pass‟ or „fail‟, but most of them opted for a holistic approach to
evaluation. They need explicit criteria for effective teaching in order to identify their strengths
and weaknesses and use them as guidelines for improvement. To address this paradox, they
recommend that a space should be provided for the trainee teachers‟ voice regarding approach
to teaching evaluation.
9
Very recently, Farrell (2008) reports in his case study with eighteen Singaporean
trainee teachers thirty-six critical incidents these trainee teachers encountered during their
teaching practice. The most frequent incidents were trainee teachers‟ poor language
proficiency, students‟ poor class participation and behavior. He asserts that any incidents that
occur can be dramatic to trainee students who have not experienced these before.

Vanci Osam and Balbay (2004) have examined the different decision-making patterns
and responses to difficulties of student teachers in Turkey. They suspect a mismatch between
two groups‟ needs and ways of dealing with difficulties. The student teachers were concerned
with issues of classroom management, while the mentors (or cooperating teachers) were more
concerned with matters in the here-and-now of classroom activities, such as teaching
particular parts of the coursebook. What the study demonstrates is that mentors need to be
sensitised to the difficulties faced by student teachers if they are to provide assistance of
value. Another difficulty raised is that the mentors are seen as too entrenched in a
transmission approach to teaching, reinforced by the school setting, which did not match
closely enough with the teaching ideas the student teachers had gathered from their formal
preparation sessions.


this challenge, some teacher education institutions use a “university supervisor” to make some
connections between the two contexts of school and university. A growing trend however,
amidst the current climate, is that supervisory visits are made by non-tenured hourly paid staff
who have not taught university coursework and so for them, making links between the two
contexts is difficult. Moreover, school environments are becoming increasingly „busy place‟
and so, even when students are placed in school groups, difficulties with pressured timetables
and teachers‟ commitments do not lend themselves to peers working together or university
lecturers engaging with teachers.

In summary, when leaving their university settings for actual school settings, there is a
tremendous amount of pressure on student teachers. The expectations placed on them are
high, whether by their mentor teachers, their university facilitators, or themselves. Upon
entering the school, they find themselves in an unknown situation facing a variety of
challenges emerging from their work at the school. These challenges include the following
(Available at l):

Stress of interacting with students: no matter how many pedagogical content classes a
student teacher takes regarding classroom management and child/adolescent development,
actually being around students is an overwhelming feeling. Student teachers feel pressure to
behave in a professional manner while developing a good rapport with the students. They can 11
also find themselves exhausted after such a long day of interaction, especially having
come from a much more individualized university settings.

Relationship with cooperating teacher (mentor): student teachers or mentees also feel
a great deal of stress around the relationship that will develop between them and their mentor
teachers. This relationship is extremely important for the length of the practicum and often
sets the tone for a student teacher‟s experience.

student teachers and mentors is well structured and emphasized , there is very powerful
impact on student teachers development. Similarly, several research papers from many
different countries in the world spanning over thirty years reviewed by Hobson et al (2009)
have generally supported the importance of structured collaboration in student teachers‟
learning during the practicum.

Other studies on this issue have indicated that where the collaboration is not well
structured, where there is no shared understanding among the participants on teaching
approaches, and if cooperating teachers are not prepared for their roles, there is usually no
productive learning for the student teachers and that the student teachers might end up with
very negative practicum experiences (e.g Farrell, 2001, 2008; Graham, 2006). Hence,
mentoring programs should be devised for mentors to assist their mentees develop
pedagogical knowledge and overcome context-specific difficulties. Researchers (e.g. Forbes,
2004; Garnes, 2004; Hawkey, 1997) have shown that mentoring relationships in school-based
programs can shape student teachers‟ professional practice. Undoubtedly, student teachers in
their formative stages of development require assistance from more experienced colleagues.
More specifically, effective mentoring programs provide structure and support to promote the
attainment of effective teaching skills and sound pedagogical knowledge (Arnold, 2006;
Woullard & Coat, 2004).

It is established that school mentors play important roles in effectively mentoring
student teachers during their teaching practice (Borko & Mayfield, 1995; Ewell, 2004). A
mentor may be defined as “one who is more knowledgeable on teaching practices and through
explicit mentoring processes develops pedagogical self-efficacy in the mentee towards
autonomous teaching practices” (Hudson, 2004, p.216-217). Five factors for mentors‟
facilitation of the mentoring process have been theoretically and empirically identified. These
five factors are: personal attributes, system requirements, pedagogical knowledge, modelling,
and feedback (Hudson, 2005). Mentors need to display personal attributes that facilitate a
collaborative working relationship (Ganser, 1991). System requirements must be made
explicit to student teachers in order to understand departmental directives for teaching

communication established between supervisor and master teacher. The responsibilities of the
cooperating teacher and the purpose of the visits from the supervisor need to be clearly
established. At the same time, student teachers need to be made aware of what is expected of
them. Zimpher, deVoss, and Nott (1980), in one of the few studies on the relationship
between supervision and student teacher, attest to the crucial role of the supervisor:

First, at least four of the findings suggest that if the university supervisor were not
directly involved in the student teaching experience, there would have been no direction set 14
for requirements, evaluation, or assessment of the student teacher‟s experience in the
school site. Second, informational communication between participants appeared to be
enhanced because of the presence of the university supervisor. Students and teachers (and the
principal) appeared unable to deal with each other very directly and needed an interlocutor‟s
assistance-in this case the university supervisor. Third, even though the university supervisor
in the study appeared to be frustrated by a lack of direct influence on the teaching style of the
student teachers, the supervisor seemed to be the only one making any critical contributions to
the student teachers‟ progress. (p.14)

Sandholtz and Shannon (2000) stress the important role of practicum supervision in
teacher preparation programs. According to these researchers, the supervisor plays the role
not only as a subject matter expert and a resourceful person for pedagogical strategies for
teaching a particular discipline, but also as a leading subject matter resource for student
teachers. For scholars such as Adey and Speedy (1993) and Hawkey (1998) the student
teacher‟s success in the practicum depends partly on how well the supervisor does his or her
job. They stress the need to establish a good degree of cooperation between the practicum
supervisor and the cooperating teacher. The supervisor‟s role and responsibilities are
changing depending on the development and requirements of the teaching-learning process
and the teacher preparation methods. Sandholtz and Shannon (2000) state that the availability

Chapter 2: the study
16
The previous chapter has presented a literature review on theory of the practicum,
challenges that student teachers face when they enter the practicum, collaboration between
student teachers and mentors, and supervision during the practicum. This chapter presents the
methodology used in this study and the instruments of data collection and analysis in the
study. It starts with a description of the setting of the study and the participants. It then
describes the instruments of data collection and analysis procedures of the study. It also
presents the advantages and disadvantages of each data collection instrument.
were followed by teaching without supervision. However, during this time they had many
challenges. 17

As a teacher educator at Nghe An College, one of my concerns regarding the
practicum is how to help the student teachers feel confident enough to be successful in their
practicum. Therefore, it is my intention to explore the challenges of these student teachers
may meet with during the practicum with the hope to identify a gap, if any, between the
existing teacher education programme and the school context so that suggestions for
improvement can be made.

2.2 Participants
This qualitative study was conducted with 5 student teachers of English at Nghe An
Teachers‟ College, while they were having a 6-week practicum at a lower secondary school in
Quynh Luu district, Nghe An province. The practicum lasted from February 22
nd
to April 2
nd
.

These student teachers were from K10 cohort, which had a student teacher population
of 40. These forty student teachers were divided into 7 groups that were placed in different
lower secondary schools in Quynh Luu district. The five student teachers were selected for
this study on the basis of my personal relationship with them and their willingness to
participate. Because of my good personal relationship with them, I was able to contact with
them during the practicum to encourage and to remind them to write the diaries. This

the research.
According to Bailey (1990), “a diary [study] is a first-person account of a language
learning or teaching experience, documented through regular, candid entries in a personal
journal [and then analysed for recurring patterns or salient events” (p. 215). A number of
writers (e.g. Holly, 1984; Hopkins, 1993) make a distinction between logs, journals and
diaries. Holly regards (a) logs as a record of factual information, (b) diaries as the kind of
subjective text, and (c) journals as a combination of the two, containing both „subjective‟ and
„objective‟ data. In this study I shall, for convenience, simply refer to „diaries‟ as a subjective
text containing any kind of information – factual, feelings, attitudes, and reactions. Bell
(1999) notes that the term „diary studies‟ usually refers to data obtained from „solicited
diaries‟ only, that is, from accounts produced specifically at the researcher‟s request, by an
informant or informants. Dornyei (2007) claims that
In applied linguistics, diaries have been used since the beginning of
the1980s to obtain personal accounts of the experience of language
learning both by learners themselves and by parents documenting their 19
(mainly bilingual) children‟s L2 development, and diary studies
have been used in teacher education programmes. (p. 156)

Dornyei (2007) also argues that an element of the qualitative inquiry is to try and elicit
the participants‟ own descriptions and interpretations of events and behaviours – in diary
studies the participants inevitably become co-researchers as they keep records of their own
feelings, thoughts, or activities. He therefore asserts that diary data is by definition an insider
account.

McDonough and McDonough (1997) argue that diaries are best written over an
extended period, and „snapshot‟ extracts cannot capture changes over time which can be often
very marked, so any one segment belongs originally in a broader temporal and contextual


Bailey (1990, p. 219) diagrammatises the production of a diary study into five steps:
1. Account of diarist‟s professional background
2. Confidential diary
3. Revision of entries for public version
4. Analysis
5. Interpretation and discussion.
2.4.2 Interviews: Together with diary, interviews are considered as a useful instrument
for collecting data because they can give the researcher a deeper insight into the subjects. Yet,
interviews have some drawbacks. The first, they are time consuming (for this study I spent 6
hours). The second, they may introduce elements of subjectivity and personal bias. The third,
rapport may cause the interviewee to respond in a way to please the interviewer. To avoid
these problems the student teachers were asked to be honest with their answers.
2.5 Data Collection Procedures
The data collection procedures started in early February and ended in mid April 2010.
All of the procedures involved the following steps.
Step 1: Inviting the student teachers to write diaries
Before the practicum one week I chose a group of student teachers who agreed to
participate in this study. I talked with them about my intentions and asked them to help me
with keeping diaries during their practicum. Following their agreement to be participants, I
gave each a notebook for the diaries. I also gave them instructions in Vietnamese on how to
keep the diaries with an emphasis on what to write in the diaries. All these instructions were
then printed out and attached to the cover of each notebook (see Appendix 1). 21
Step 2: Coding and Analysis
After these student teachers finished their practicum, I met them and collected the
diaries which I read through carefully to identify common themes and the particulars
emerging from the data. The data were coded according to the following themes: