Understanding the trajectory of pre-service EFL teachers’ professional development in a community of practice

This study attempts to explore the trajectory of pre-service EFL teachers' professional development in a collaborative online community of practice. Although reflective practice has been widely recognised as a useful means to help teachers develop their professional expertise (McIntyre, 1993), proper training is essential to develop teachers' reflective skills. Furthermore, according to Johnson & Golombek (2011), participation in a community of practice and interaction with other professionals contribute to the development of teacher expertise. This implies that developing a community where student teachers can share their thoughts, issues, and challenges with others and support each other will most likely help develop both their reflective skills and expertise. Thus, this study seeks to delve deeper into examining how a collaborative community of pre-service EFL teachers facilitates the development of their reflective skills and professional expertise. This case study investigated nine pre-service teachers enrolled in initial teacher education programmes at two universities in Japan. The participants were evenly distributed into two groups. Each group formed a shared online forum, in which they posted their journal entries, read each other's entries, and made comments on them for one academic year. Using a combination of online journals and focus-group interviews, we examined how they communicated and connected their perspectives and experiences in a web-based collaborative environment and how such an environment supported them to reflect on teaching practice and develop teacher expertise. In order to investigate frequently appearing contents and analyze the hierarchical and co-occurrence relations among terms, the text-mining method and a quantitative content analysis approach was used.