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Impact of a Professional Development Programme

The next contradiction was related to the methodology used:

I have also learned from my mentor what I should not do. He was using very traditional ways of teach-
ing English like translation or ‘repeat after me’ technique. Students got bored and they forgot if they did
not write and study what they learned. I could see the drawbacks of this implementation. I don’t want
to teach in a traditional way as my mentor (Interview).

Before the teaching practicum, Özge held a set of conflicting beliefs about language teaching by
perceiving a dichotomy between the traditional approach (focusing on translation and drills) and a com-
municative classroom. Influenced by the university coursework, she believed that “language learning
needs to be meaningful and interactive and teachers develop students’ communicative abilities, use L2
mostly and manage the class effectively” (Interview).
She further stated the class she dreamed about as:

…full of communication opportunities, materials, audios etc. And when I saw that classroom, I thought
it would be impossible to manage young learners and take their attention even with interesting activities
and in a friendly way because I couldn’t imagine that a teacher chose such a traditional way without
trying the others. Briefly, I was hopeless for that (Interview).

However, these beliefs were at odds with her mentor’s teaching instruction, dominated by grammar
drills and memorization. Thus, she was not certain whether communicative activities could be success-
fully applied to the real language classroom.
The next interview with the participant was carried out before she started teaching in the practicum,
which aimed to investigate her beliefs about language teaching and learning and about herself as a lan-
guage teacher:

Since I had so many opportunities to observe my mentor in the first term, I made some decisions about
my own teaching process. For example, I decided that I would use L2 in class frequently and I would be
more a facilitator towards the students. Teaching young learners is like creating a new picture. Those
children are looking at your eyes, watching what you will teach them. They are open to new things.

In the following section, changes in Özge’s belief system in three areas are presented: (1) the use of
L2; (2) classroom management; (3) activities to attract students’ attention

Belief Changes in Relation to L2 Use

As noted by Stuart & Thurlow (2000), trainee teachers can engage in dialogic reflection with their mentors
in their teaching practice where different ideas and understanding can be shared and developed, which
can exert great influence on their belief transformation. First of all, through designing lesson plans and
her dialogic interaction with the mentor, her prior perception of language teaching in relation to the use
of L1 versus L2 was challenged (Mattheoudakis, 2007), as she reflects in her journal, following her first
teaching experience:

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