Understanding Student-Teachers? Concerns in EFL Teaching through Reflective Practice

This article presents the student-teachers- perceived strengths and weaknesses of a study conducted to explain the extent to which reflective teaching can improve the student-teachers- pedagogy competence in teaching English as a foreign language. The study was conducted with 29 EFL students who were taking a Micro Teaching subject at the English Department of a state university in Indonesia. The data were collected through journal, observation, and interview. The results of the analysis show that the student-teachers1) focused their attention on five aspects of teaching, 2) perceived that the most problematic aspect was how to teach rather than what to teach, 3) thought that their difficulties were mostly due to lack of practical models, 4) did not think they had problems in their English. Except the last, the student-teachers- perception about their teaching was generally congruent with the researcher-s observation note. There are three important conclusions that can be drawn from this study. First, reflective teaching was a good strategy to raise the student-teachers- awareness of their strengths and weaknesses. Second, the student-teachers had relatively good capability to judge their own performance. Third, journal can be considered as useful instrument to unveil the student-teachers- concerns and difficulties in teaching English.