Tracing the reflective practices of student teachers in online modes

During the course of pre- and in-service teacher education programmes, reflection can happen in a number of ways, for example: reflective journals, personal stories and pair/group co-operative discussions, professional development portfolios, and blogs and electronic portfolios. The aim of this paper is to examine various technologies such as online chat, discussion forums and blogs, in terms of their suitability and affordances as reflective media. It begins by examining positional survey data gathered from student teachers (STs) who have used these social media over a period of time. Following this it focuses on one of the desired outcomes of Reflective Practice (RP), the construction of teacher identity as part of the process of becoming a professional. The construction of identity through the mediational tool of language used across these modes is examined through a corpus linguistics lens. Collections of language produced around RP activities are analysed as a corpus in quantitative and qualitative ways. These complementary sources of data in a mixed-methods approach provide some insights into the technologies and their potential in a Language Teacher Education (LTE) context. To this end, our findings suggest that blogs, in particular, foster narration, RP and the expression of identities, while chat and forums promote emotional and affective engagement, all of which can be useful to STs at the initial and continuing stages of their career.