Reconstruction of Pre-Service EFL Teachers’ Conceptual Understandings About SLA and Language Pedagogy Through Experiential Tasks

The course on Second Language Acquisition (SLA), which is a component of language teacher education programs, includes consciousness-raising and experiential activities that prepare pre-service teachers for the profession. Pre-service English teachers need to have a well-grounded understanding of how SLA relates to language teaching to comprehend how SLA theories contribute to their language teaching processes. To address this need, this study examined the effects of an SLA course on pre-service teachers’ conceptual changes and beliefs regarding language pedagogy. To identify the extent of their conceptual changes and awareness, a language-learning autobiography project was used to decode multifaceted processes and elements of their first and second language acquisition. Pre-service teachers were asked to describe their language acquisition processes before taking the SLA course and then to revise their autobiographies in line with the theories and concepts covered in the SLA course. Content analysis was used to compare the two versions gathered from 54 pre-service teachers, and emerging themes and concepts in both forms were identified. The overall findings indicate that their initial versions are limited to basic linguistic descriptions, whereas they have gained a rich repertoire of grounds and connections and an understanding of the relevance of SLA to language pedagogy. Relatedly, instructional implications were suggested to facilitate their professional stance and understanding of the relationship between SLA and language pedagogy.