الملخص الإنجليزي
This qualitative study introduced six English language teaching (ELT) student teachers at
Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) to the use of critical reflection, identified the
professional dilemmas that the student teachers encountered during teaching practice, and
explored how the participant student teachers used critical incidents to reflect on these
dilemmas. The student teachers' reflections on critical incidents encountered during their
practicum, recordings of collaborative talks, as well as an analysis of pertinent literature
were used to answer the following two research questions:
1. What professional dilemmas do the participant ELT student teachers at SQU
face during their practicum as they perceive them?
2. How do the participant student teachers reflect on these professional
dilemmas?
3. What alternative solutions did the participants find for the Omani ELT system
using critical incident reflection?
This study combined four qualitative research designs: critical action, critical
ethnography, critical phenomenology, and critical narrative research. Critical incidents
were used to reflect critically on professional dilemmas encountered by six ELT student
teachers at SQU who did their teaching practice in different schools in Oman in Spring
2021. The six teachers participated in a 10-week intervention in the form of a training
program during their practicum. The training program started with a 2-day online
workshop to demonstrate participants' understanding of critical incidents and
professional dilemmas in teaching, and to introduce them to the use of critical incidents
to reflect critically on professional dilemmas encountered during their practicum. Then,
the participants were supported and encouraged to reflect on critical incidents. In addition,
regular online collaborative talks were conducted as part of the reflection process to
facilitate discussion of the critical incidents among the participants. Participants'
reflections as well as recordings of the collaborative talks were collected regularly
throughout the intervention. Data, including18 reflections on different critical incidents
encountered by participants, as well as recordings of three collaborative talks about these
incidents, were subjected to framework analysis to extract themes.
The findings revealed that critical incident reflection enabled participants in this
study to go beyond a superficial and practical level of reflection to critically and
systematically approach various dilemmas encountered during the practicum experience,
as well as critically examine alternative solutions for dealing with them. The analysis
revealed three themes: understanding critical incidents as a tool for reflection, using
critical incidents to reflect critically on the Omani ELT professional dilemmas, and using
critical incidents to reflect critically on alternative solutions to Omani ELT professional
dilemmas.
The findings have a number of implications for both the teacher education
program at SQU and the Ministry of Education. Recommendations are made for
developing more effective and sophisticated approaches and programs for implementing
critically reflective teaching. More action research should be conducted to investigate
teachers' professional dilemmas related to COVID-19. Finally, more efforts should be
taken by researchers to use critical action research to intervene in Omani ELT matters and
seek effective and appropriate solutions.
