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Postdoctoral Project (Dr. Leo Will)

A phenomenology of pre-service language teacher education in Germany

This research project explores the lived experience of teachers who have studied English at university. What do they retain? How do they feel about specific incidents they recall? What has been most meaningful to them? Or more broadly: What is it like to undergo pre-service language teacher education in Germany? The latter provision is a thoroughly investigated area within the larger context of teacher education, however not from a holistic and phenomenological point of view. The research design is based on interpretative phenomenological analysis (Smith et al. 2022), foregrounding what is experienced as meaningful by the individual. By means of episodic-narrative interviews (Flick 2011; Schütze 1983), English teachers from across Germany (n = 20) were asked to report on their university experience. The technique features considerable openness so as to elicit what is deemed noteworthy by the respondent themself. The interviewees relate important events and, crucially, evince strong evaluations of specific occurrences they recall. Among numerous findings, the study reveals individual orientations toward different educational aims. On one end of the spectrum, teachers display an appreciation of generally formative experiences and personal growth (“Bildung”), on the other end, and far more frequently, they express an unfulfilled desire to be trained in utilitarian ways for what awaits them as teachers in the foreign language classroom (“Ausbildung”).

  • Flick, Uwe (2011). Das episodische Interview. In: Gertrud Oelerich and Hans-Uwe Otto (eds.): Empirische Forschung und soziale Arbeit. Ein Studienbuch. 1st ed. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften / Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, 273–280.
  • Schütze, Fritz (1983). Biographieforschung und narratives Interview. In: Neue Praxis 13 (3), 283–293.
  • Smith, Jonathan; Flowers, Paul; Larkin, Michael (2022). Interpretative phenomenological analysis. Theory, method and research. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Sage.