Promoting the Participation of the Student Teachers Studying Their Second Year At English Language Teaching Department

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to share an action research carried in an English Language Teacher Training Program in Turkey. In the lessons of the methodology course entitled as Fundamental Aspects of ELT, the observations of the researcher indicated lack of student participation as a major problem throughout the semester. Therefore, an action research was carried out in order to investigate the reasons of these students' lack of participation and try out solutions. The research aimed to answer these research questions: 1. What are the reasons of student-teachers' lack of participation? 2. How can the student-teachers be more active in the classroom? a. What can the instructor do to improve the situation? b. What can the student-teachers do to improve the situation? In order to answer these research questions, interviews and questionnaire were used as data collection instruments. At first, the instructor of the course was interviewed. Afterwards, 27 participants answered the questionnaire and five of them were interviewed. The results indicated the lack of student preparation for the lesson and the way the instructor asks questions as the reasons for the problem. Therefore, the necessary changes for both the students and the instructor are discussed such as giving a quiz, conducting group discussions and calling students' names. Then the frame of the action plan was determined. After the implementation of action plan with these changes, an improvement was observed in the students' participation. The paper reports this action research process and explains the action plan in detail.