The Reflections of Jordanian EFL Student Teachers on their Instructional Acomplishments in the Practical Education Programme

This study attempted to explore the accomplishments achieved by (78) EFL student teachers who were taking the practicum courses in the second semester 2004/2005. To achieve this purpose, an open questionnaire was used to elicit data from the participants in this study about their accomplishments in the spheres of classroom management skills, lesson planning, development and design and production of instructional aids, instructional methods, the acquisition of interpersonal skills and finally the evaluation of EFL classroom students' learning. The results of the study, above all, pointed to the importance of the practicum.. It was also found out that most of the instructional skills were acquired by the EFL student teacher gradually as the student teachers advance in the practicum. As far as classroom management skills were concerned, their acquisition was linked to the nature of the classroom, its size; relationships with EFL classroom students, quality of instruction and nature of teaching methods adopted by the student teacher. In the sphere of lesson planning, the student teachers discovered, through lesson planning, the importance of new teaching methods and media and aids as well as the importance of the lesson plan itself. In the acquisition of interpersonal skills, student teachers in this study pointed to the importance of establishing links with practitioners in the co-operating school and the significance of such interpersonal skills in solving problems classroom students encountered. Also, the results pointed out that student teacher's development of the interpersonal skills was transferable to classroom students themselves in becoming willing to work together through co-operative learning activities. As to subject matter mastery, the responses of the student teachers varied who pointed to the need to have further links between university courses and school syllabuses and to give more specialization courses to these student teachers while several of them said that there was no problem with this competency. The researcher recommended the importance of following up and monitoring the training of the student teachers in the pre-service programmes to ensure both the quality of such programmes and the extent of their contribution to the development of the instructional skills required to practice the teaching profession.