Corpus-Based Reflective Practice to Support Chatroom Teaching Practice

Teaching practice has long been considered a fundamental and integral part of any teacher education programme, but also very demanding for novice teachers when they are confronted with the reality of the classroom, for the first time in many cases. Teacher educators aim to allow student teachers to experience practice opportunities reflective of their many potential real-world future teaching scenarios, including, for example, teaching online through video conferencing tools or virtual reality. One such mode is teaching in chatrooms, using written language only, which is the focus of this paper. The aims of this research are therefore to investigate the use of corpus based reflective practice (CBRP) using a (written) chatroom corpus with student teachers and evaluate this approach through an exploration of their recounted perceptions. To do this, we conduct a preliminary corpus-based analysis of some of the more salient features of the student teacher chatroom corpus and examine how these align with the student teachers’ reported perceptions. Secondly, we aim to identify and evaluate the nature of the (spoken) discussions in the post-chatroom teaching experience interactions between the teacher educator and student teachers with reference to reflective practice engagement.