Reflective approach to cultural experiences of pre-service teachers of foreign languages

Abstract

Reflective practice has become a very important concept in teacher education. The current article focuses on the reflective approach to cultural experiences of pre-service teachers of foreign languages. It is maintained that reflexivity of cultural experience is considered as an assessment criterion for the culhtral competence of foreign language le arners. Hence, the aim of the research is to investigate the reflective skills of preservice teachers of foreign languages concerning their cultural experience gained during foreign language studies at university. Seeking to identify reflective abilities of foreign language students, three aspects were taken into consideration: I) reflection on cultural-linguistic knowledge acquired during the university studies (cognitive level); 2) reflection on emotions and feelings related to cultural experiences (affective level); and 3) reflection on cultural participation and behaviour (conative level). The research employed the qualitative methods of unstmctured reflection (a ten-minute essay). The research results revealed that the preservice teachers of foreign languages demonstrated fairly good reflective skills in all the three domains. The reflection of the cognitive domain of culhtral competence reveals the changes in the informants' cultural experience in terms of seeking for personal development, perception of own national and cultural identity, and the changed attitude towards the target country and its culture. The analysis of the reflection of the affective domain demonstrates that the pre-service teacher tend to experience positive emotions towards the target culture more often than negative, whereas the reflection of the conative domain proves that the inforrnants tend to highlight autonomy, activeness and quality of their perforrnance in culture-related situations.