Reshaping Teacher Training: Insights from Pre-Service English Teachers' Online Micro Teaching Experiences

Online teaching is the new normal of today’s education especially after the Covid-19 pandemic that impacted the entire world tremendously. Keeping this in mind, it is currently essential to reshape teacher training as suitable to the requirements of the modern education. For this reason, pre-service English teachers should be prepared to teach online after graduation. Therefore, the present qualitative study investigates pre-service English teachers’ online micro teaching experiences in teaching writing and reading skills in Turkish context. Data were collected through reflection papers that each pre-service teacher wrote after their micro-teachings and an open-ended questionnaire that they completed at the end of the term and analyzed through content analysis. The findings showed that pre-service teachers experienced certain advantages of online teaching such as using online teaching features and reaching online materials easily. However, they also mentioned certain challenges. They mostly had difficulty in making students attend the lessons and participate it actively. That is why most participants favored virtual classroom teaching compared to online teaching and highlighted that effective online teachers should be able to attract students’ attention, use technology effectively, and be patient.