Pre-Service ELT Teachers Appreciate Hands-On Work for Their Professional Learning: A Qualitative Case Study

Pre-service teacher professional learning could be affected by a range of factors such as pre-service teachers’ prior schooling experiences and the effectiveness of the courses offered in the pre-service teacher education program. The absence of research in the literature carried out to examine second-year pre-service English teachers’ perceptions concerning their experiences of planning a lesson to teach a speech act and giving a presentation on it encouraged the researchers to conduct this investigation. This qualitative case study investigates 25 sophomore pre-service English teachers’ perceptions with regard to the effect of preparing a lesson plan for the teaching of a speech act they selected and the presentations they made on it in online Pragmatics and Language Teaching course to their professional learning. The data was collected from a qualitative survey and semi-structured telephone interviews. The inductive analysis of the gathered data revealed that the pre-service English teachers contended preparing a lesson plan to teach the speech acts they chose and giving a presentation on it enhanced their professional learning. The findings also indicated the pre-service English teachers’ desire for more hands-on work starting from the first year in the pre-service English teacher education program.