In Japan, pre-service teacher trainings are conducted in teacher training programs approved by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) at universities. Students who wish to become teachers must complete one of the programs at their institutions. These training programs not only play an important role in shaping teachers' identity but also affect learners' beliefs about language learning.
In this presentation, I will first look at the current guideline for the programs and examine 1) how it has been interpreted by institutions and consequently 3) how teacher training programs limit the trainees' access to information relevant to their own contexts of teaching. Narratives from English teachers with a few years of experience were analyzed in order to investigate how their beliefs about English language teaching had been influenced by their limited accesses to the resources provided by teacher training programs and how they had modified their beliefs as well as their subsequent actions through their experience. Through the preliminary analysis, it was found that the training programs were designed based on dominant concepts mostly those of the West, such as 'native speakers', 'four skills', and/or 'standards' without sufficient discussion on their relevance to the contexts of Japanese schools and the trainees had no choice but to accept them as their alternatives were rarely presented.
The presentation will conclude by stressing the importance of the teachers' continuous reflections on the trainings they had received at different stages of their teaching career, as an effective strategy to align their training and experience with their own contexts.
References
Oda, M. (2014) Reconditioning the Conditions for Second Language Learning: Social Conditions and Learner Motivation. In Sung, K and Spolsky, B, eds. Conditions for English Language Teaching and Learning in Asia. Cambridge Scholar Publishing. 105-125.
