Pre-Service Teachers’ Anxiety and Anxiety Management during the First Encounter with Students in EFL Classroom

Abstract

The first classroom encounter is a challenging experience for pre-service teachers who meet and teach new students. It is undeniable that first encounters can create and increase pre-service teachers’ anxiety. The key purposes of the study were to investigate possible causes of pre-service teachers’ anxiety and to study how the teachers managed their anxiety effectively. Four pre-service teachers participated in the study. Focus group interviews were conducted to interrogate participants three times during this study: a few days before first teaching, a few days after first teaching, and in the middle of the semester. Each interview took 30-45 minutes and was tape-recorded. The causes of anxiety were grouped into four categories according to the research framework determined: teacher’s own personality, teaching context, supervision context, and others. Another important finding is that there were successful anxiety management techniques, i.e., ‘self-control’, ‘let-it-be’, and ‘face-it and handle-it’. The pedagogical implications of this study will be beneficial to the field of language teacher development because teacher trainers can familiarize pre-service teachers with particular anxiety-related problems.

Keywords: pre-service teachers’ anxiety, causes of teachers’ anxiety, anxiety management, first encounter