TESOL, A Profession That Eats its Young: The Importance of Reflective Practice in Language Teacher Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The field of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) is similar to other fields in that we must not take it for granted that novice teachers will survive their first year without some kind of support. This paper outlines how three novice ESL teachers in Canada survived their first year without any support from the school they were placed. Specifically, the paper outlines how they, with the aid of a facilitator, engaged in reflective practice by using a framework for reflecting on practice to help them navigate complex issues and challenges they faced during their first year of teaching. Had they not engaged in such structured reflection during their first year, they would have probably become another statistic of those who quit the profession and contribute to the growing perception that TESOL is a profession that eats its young. The paper suggests that language teacher educators and novice teachers should not just wait until their first year to learn the skills of reflective practice but should do so much earlier in their teacher education programs so that they can be better prepared for the transition from their teacher education programs to the first year of teaching.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".