Nur Hayati, Utami Widiati, Furaidah
This qualitative case study is aimed at exploring the pedagogical decision making of English student teachers in planning and implementing a lesson that focused on listening and reading skills. We involved six student teachers in our study, all of whom attended a one-year teacher professional education program (Pendidikan Profesi Guru) in one university in Indonesia. We collected the data by examining the student teachers’ lesson plans, observing their peer teaching, doing an oral reflection with them, and studying their reflective journals. The student teachers appeared to show reasonable pedagogical decisions in terms of formulating comprehensive indicators of competences, employing various teaching techniques, preparing a number of texts and creative media, and trying to use English as the medium of instruction, which appeared to result from their understanding of relevant pedagogical principles as well as learning from the experience and feedback from lecturers and mentor teachers. However, we found issues concerning linguistic accuracy of the texts and the scope of the comprehension exercises. There also appeared to be lack of probing and higher order questioning from the student teachers during the class discussion of the exercises. From the students’ reflective journals, we found that these issues seem to be grounded in the student teachers’ lack of knowledge on the micro skills of listening and reading, and their conception of questions and feedback. Another main issue with the student teachers’ pedagogical decision making concerns the assessment, which relates to the potentially confusing dichotomy between “knowledge” and “skills” domains in the English syllabus of the 2013 curriculum applied in Indonesia. © Centre for Language Studies.
Universitas Negeri Malang, Indonesia
