Page 110 - Pedagoška vizija / A Pedagogical Vision

Anja Pirih and Silva Bratož

There are two other challenges very often reported by the participants
that can be linked to the physical absence of a teacher, namely simulating
authentic communication and giving feedback. The participants often men-
tioned that they tried to design the lessons so that the pupils would feel as if
the teacher was there, communicating with them. This consequently meant
theystruggledwithsimulatingcommunicationthatwouldresembleauthen-
tic communication in the classroom and, as a part of it, giving meaningful
feedback to the expected responses by the pupils (such as using a pause af-
ter a question to allow time for the pupil’s answer). When asked what they
found the most challenging, one participant explained: ‘Recording my spo-
ken communication. It was really difficult for me to get into the role of some-
one who is speaking to oneself. This was really hard.’
Quite a few participants reported struggling with the length of the MTL
format, especially after the lesson planning stage – they wondered whether
they would manage to ‘squeeze everything into 10 minutes’ or how to ‘strip
thepresentation sothatit fits into this shortamountoftime.’Someofthem
linked this issue with the time management aspect of lesson planning and
concluded that they would probably have the same problems planning and
delivering a 45-minute face-to-face session as well.
Three participants reported difficulties finding and creating suitable con-
tent and exercises. As they explained, they did not know what to expect from
pupils of a certain age in terms of EFL competence but also cognitive devel-
opment. Consequently, they found it hard to estimate the right level of dif-
ficulty when choosing content and designing exercises for a specific grade,
worrying predominantly about making the lesson too difficult and thus un-
suitable for independent learning.
The insecurities and challenges the participants experienced may be re-
lated to their profile as prospective generalist teachers, who during their
studies are exposed to teaching methodology in a variety of subjects, such
as mathematics, arts, science, etc. and do not focus exclusively on language
teaching approaches as pre-service specialist teachers do. This issue is also
stressed by Lambe (2011) and Murphy, Marron, and Coulter (2021), who have
recognized the limitations of pre-service education programmes in prepar-
ing education students to teach different subjects across the curriculum. On
the other hand, the results also show that they struggled with the switch to
remote asynchronous online teaching, as this modality is so very different
from the synchronous classroom teaching that they had practised. In any
case, we may conclude that the proposed reflective practice process enabled
them to identify and better understand the key issues and challenges of TEYL

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