Education Faculty Presentations
Preservice Teachers’ Use of Frustration to Enhance Communication
Abstract
Pre-service teaching, a required component of accredited teacher education programs across the United States, provides the opportunity for pre-service teachers to not only teach in their specific fields, but also to work with specific populations of students, such as English Language Learners (ELLs). Rarely, however, do pre-service teachers from the U.S. have the opportunity to teach ELLs in contexts where languages other than English and cultures other than American are dominant. This presentation reports how pre-service teachers teaching ELLs in just such situations dealt with frustrations common to pre-service teachers and also frustrations due to situational contexts. Through self-reporting, these pre-service teachers describe how they used these frustrations to inform their conceptual knowledge, to make changes in their own English while teaching English to others, and to improve their teaching skills.
