Novice Language Teachers : Insights and Perspectives for the First Year

The first year of teaching has been characterized as a type of “reality shock” for many language teachers. This may be because the ideals that novice teachers formed during teacher training/education are often replaced by the reality of school life where much of their energy has shifted to learning how to adapt and survive in a new school culture. Although the first year of teaching has been well documented in general education research, not many detailed studies outlining the experiences of language teachers in their first year of teaching have been documented in the language education literature. This is surprising because as some scholars have suggested, in order to establish an effective knowledge-base for second/foreign language teacher education, language teacher educators must have some understanding of schools and schooling and the social and cultural contexts in which learning how to teach takes place. The purpose of this collection is to discuss the challenges and influences novice language teachers face when teaching in their first years. The volume outlines several detailed case studies of the experiences second/foreign language teachers during their first year of teaching in such diverse contexts as the USA, Canada, Singapore, Cambodia, the UK, Italy, southern Europe, Hong Kong, and Japan.