Proceedings of The World Conference on Teaching and Education
Year: 2019
DOI:
Teacher Readiness for TEFL in the Non-Formal Education in Thailand
Nawarat Siritararatn
ABSTRACT:
Teaching English as a foreign language effectively in schools has its own difficulties. A great body of research has proven that different factors are involved in these problems. Yet, teaching English for Non-Formal Education (NFE) students is even more challenging as these students are out-of-school children, adolescents and adults who have their own crucial features as they do not belong to the same age group. Most of them are in employment, so they participate on a voluntary basis. Therefore, teaching English effectively for NFE students focuses not only on practicing basic knowledge and skills for communication but also giving them positive attitudes towards English language learning and the tools for further language skills development. To shed light on the effective English language teaching characteristics, many studies emphasize the study of teacher cognition based on the notion that effective learning is strongly related to teacher beliefs and effective teaching. This study investigated NFE teachers’ perceptions towards the effective English language teacher characteristics (Dincer et. al, 2013). 109 NFE teachers participated in the English proficiency test and 2 NFE teachers were interviewed by using an open-ended interview protocol to explore their perceptions towards the effective English language teacher characteristics. Findings reveal that NFE teachers perceived that “subject-matter knowledge” and “pedagogical knowledge” are important for being effective English language teachers. However, the NFE teachers should also have the ‘personality characteristics” and “socio-affective skills’ as these two aspects are considered crucial for motivating the out-of-school students to be actively involved in the learning process.
Keywords: teacher cognition; effective English language teacher; subject matter knowledge; pedagogical knowledge; teacher characteristics.