Creating Inclusive Spaces: A Narrative Inquiry of EFL Pre-Service Teacher’s Strategies to Engage Silent student in the English Classroom

Abstract

The teacher's ability to teach has played an essential role in engaging students in learning, especially in EFL contexts. Pre-service teacher must begin to prepare their students, including the teaching methods and styles that they will apply when teaching. In actual conditions, a class has students of various types. One of them is silent student. To engage silent student to be actively involved in English class requires the right strategy to be used. This is the reason why this research was conducted. This study aimed to explore the strategies used by pre-service teacher to engage silent student in English classes during field experience activities. However, the difficulties experienced by pre-service teacher in the process will be explained before describing the strategies used by the teacher. This research used a qualitative approach with a narrative inquiry design. Ida (pseudonym) was the selected participant in this study. The researcher used interview techniques to collect data. The interview results were analyzed using six thematic analyses (Braun & Clarke, 2006). First, the researcher familiarized, generated initial codes, searched for themes, reviewed the potential themes, refined themes, and finally defined and named themes. The findings revealed that pre-service teacher build active interactions with silent student in the classroom by knowing the difficulties experienced by the students during teaching and then applying the right strategies to the students. The strategy used by the pre-service teacher was to build good personal branding to increase self-confidence when teaching and then use face-to-face approach techniques to silent student. Based on this research, it can be concluded that pre-service teacher should prepare themselves thoroughly, especially by having strategies to deal with silent student and other types of students. This will facilitate the pre-service teacher for the learning process in the classroom. Future researchers on the same topic can use a quantitative or mixed method approach to explore more participants so that the strategies obtained are more varied and can be used for the next learning process.

Keywords: Classroom engagement, pre-service teacher, silent student, teaching difficulties, teaching strategies.