Abstract

The research explored the reflective practice of student teachers on efforts to improve how student teachers learn from their experiences of tutorial teaching in school. Tutoring means teachers working with individual students to support their learning. During this project, eight student teachers tried to help underachieving high school students improve their vocabulary confidence, learning skills and their memorising strategies so that the students could remember more vocabulary and use it more appropriately. Meanwhile, their self-confidence in English language learning could be developed. 16 junior high school students in Grade One were tutored once a week for 30 minutes, more than 10 successive weeks on the use of certain English lexical items. The tutorials took place from March to June in 2010 at a high school in an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) context. Eight student teachers were the tutors providing instruction, practice in pronunciation and vocabulary usage. The students who received the tuition made significant progress in word recognition. The results indeed showed that the young learners had benefitted from the eight student teachers’ teaching methods. This project was intended to help junior high school students learn more vocabulary through the tuition of student teachers. Its success lies also in the fact that the eight student teachers were able to realise their ideas about effective vocabulary teaching and allowed them to appreciate the value of individual tuition.

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