Primary School Teacher Candidates’ Reflective Essays on the Categories That They Find Problematic When Teaching English at Primary Schools in Sweden

Abstract

This article comprises a mixed-methods study of primary school teacher candidates’ (henceforth participants) reflections associated with the categories that they find problematic when teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at primary schools in Sweden. In this study, the participants are instructed to reflect on problematic areas of teaching EFL to young learners at Swedish primary schools and present their ideas in the form of reflective essays written in the English language. The reflective essays are written after the participants have completed their school practice sessions, having taught EFL to the Years 4–6 at primary schools in Sweden. The participants’ reflective essays are analysed by means of the software program WordSmith (Scott, 2012) in order to generate a list of the most frequently used words. A qualitative component of the analysis involves the identification of a set of categories associated with the problematic areas of EFL teaching in the Years 4–6 at primary schools in Sweden. The results of the mixed-methods analysis reveal several problem areas, e.g. pronunciation, spelling, irregular verbs, adjectives, articles, vocabulary, prepositions, etc. These findings and their didactic implications for EFL teaching in the Years 4–6 at primary schools are further presented and discussed in the article.

Keywords

• English as a foreign language (EFL)
• EFL teaching
• teacher candidates
• reflective essays
• primary school