‘The Class of My Dreams’ as Envisioned by Student Teachers of English : What Is There to Teach about the Language?

Abstract

As part of a bigger project on the motivation of future EFL teachers, this chapter sets out to find out what a group of student teachers (N = 67) in Finland thought teaching English would involve once they had graduated from an MA programme and entered the profession a few years later. They were asked to envision ‘An English class of my dreams’ as the final home assignment on one of their first professionally oriented courses. The envisioning was done visually so the students produced pictures (by a variety of means) and provided further details about the class in writing, on the reverse side of the task sheet. The pool of multimodal data collected was subjected to content analysis, and it revealed a total of five different aspects of the English language the participants wished to teach. In addition, the comparison of three case studies indicated that the amount of pedagogical studies and/or teaching experience made a difference in the quality of the visions: with more years on our MA programme, the principles and practices envisioned tended to become more complex/sophisticated.