The use of reflection-for-action in planning english language lesson at primary school

Abstract

Teaching English language is a challenging task for primary school teachers. Teachers need to plan their lesson to match all levels of students in one class as there is no streaming classes allowed. This study explored how reflection-for-action to be used by the English language teachers at primary schools in Northern state of Peninsular Malaysia in planning their teaching start ing from choosing lesson objectives, planning the activities and preparing the materials. Hence, this study also gathered another relevance data on principles, benefits, changes and stages of reflection which led the teachers to use reflection-before-action in teaching English language. There were six part icipants involved in this study, three of them were male. The part icipants were experienced teachers who teach English language at primary schools with more than eighteen years teaching experience. This study used semi-structured interviews to collect the data. The researchers used thematic analysis to analyze the data. The findings revealed that reflection-for-action was very helpful to help the teachers to plan a meaningful lesson, to improve their teaching and to ma ximize their students' learning and knowledge of the target language. After applying reflection-for-action, the English language teachers managed to plan specific teaching activit ies to deliver specific skills in English language classroom to suit their teaching and learning contexts. Therefore, the four main themes found in this study contribute a recommendation for the teachers to learn and to use reflection-for-action dynamically to plan a meaningful lesson for mult iple intelligence students in the classroom. Hence, the findings also found that teachers need to apply theory in practice to plan and reason their lesson plan arrangements to fulfil the nature of teaching and learning process which needs them to attain the skills, objectives, knowledge, experiences, subject to be taught and the materials to be learned in the current teaching and learning context.