Examining novice language teachers' reflections in an online community of practice

Abstract

AbstractReflective thinking, which constitutes an important goal in language teacher education, can be fostered by participating in online communities of practice. This study explored types of reflective discourse generated by novice Spanish language teachers, and associated themes and categories, as they participated in a weekly blog and a video‐conferencing session. Types focused on descriptive versus critical reflections, while categories comprised teacher‐, learner‐, and context‐oriented themes. Blog posts, comments to posts, and video‐conference transcripts were analyzed using a mixed‐methods approach that included a corpus‐based analysis and a content discourse analysis. The results show that critical, teacher‐oriented reflections predominated in the data. This points to the benefits of engaging novice teachers in an online community of practice in terms of promoting more critical reflections during their initial teacher education, as well as the challenges inherent on expanding the focus of reflections on students' learning.