Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
1st International Congress of Innovation through Academic Writing , Kırıkkale, Türkiye, 9 - 10 Aralık 2022, ss.6
EFL PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ DEVELOPMENT OF WRITTEN FEEDBACK LITERACY: A CASE STUDY ON AN INTERNATIONAL E-MENTORING PROJECT
ABSTRACT
In initial teacher education programs, there tends to be a lack of emphasis on the development of pre-service teachers’ online written feedback literacy. With e-learning practices becoming an integral part of the mainstream education following the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a call for research on the investigation of the online written feedback provision practices of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) pre-service teachers in the Turkish higher education context. Hence, the aim of this current eight-week qualitative exploratory case study is to explore the impact of the pre-service teachers’ engagement in an e-mentoring project on the development of their written feedback provision practices on a safe educational platform called Myschoolnetwork (https://www.myschoolnetwork.com). The participants were provided with a four-hour written feedback provision training prior to their study engagement. The findings shed light into pre-service teachers’ written feedback types, the affordances and challenges they encountered in the online written feedback provision process, and the contribution of their project engagement to their professional development. It was integrated into the English Language Teaching (ELT) practicum course that was offered in the final year of a pre-service teacher education program. The data were collected via pre-service teachers' reflective journals, a questionnaire with open-ended items and focus group interviews. The data were analyzed via thematic content analysis. The study revealed that the pre-service teachers tended to focus on the task and process level feedback but in different degrees of depth. The pre-service teachers reported enhancing their teacher agency through their involvement in the written feedback provision process directed towards young EFL learners with different linguacultural backgrounds. The project engagement was also found conducive to the pre-service teachers’ identity development as well. The experiential learning opportunity provided by the e-mentoring project empowered the pre-service teachers professionally, giving them an opportunity to bridge their theoretical knowledge with the procedural one.
Key words: EFL pre-service teachers, online written feedback, e-mentoring, professional development