Facilitating In-Service English Language Teacher Trainees’ Supervision through Written Feedback: Action Research

This study examines the usefulness of an alternative supervision model for a group of in-service English Language Teachers (ELT) at the Postgraduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) programme at Bahrain Teachers College (BTC), University of Bahrain in developing those teachers’ teaching practices during their teaching practicum. A two-cycle approach was implemented, providing two different types of written feedback, written comments and structured written reports during the supervision process. Using interviews and questionnaires, teacher candidates found written feedback very effective in assisting them develop specific teaching skills, namely reflection, rethinking evaluation, surrendering certainty, and acknowledging continual professional development. The study findings also revealed one major implication that is the influence of written feedback in reinforcing a participatory supervision between the university supervisor and teacher trainee in fostering relations of trust and confidence between both of them.

was already given to the trainees in this regard.
Literature shows some studies that examined written feedback as a supervision instrument. Spear et al. (1997) investigated the effects of supplying the supervisee teachers with a written feedback on specific elements, for example, the writing style (friendly/formal, descriptive/evaluative) and the type of response made by those trainees' to their teaching mentor's advice (authoritative or cooperative). The study findings showed that those visited teachers showed improvement in their conduction of their teaching techniques after they received and discussed their written feedback reports with their mentor. In addition, Glenwright (1999) explored the discourse features of teaching practice supervision reports and found that the mentor's feedback tend to be more judgmental and appraisal than to provide suggestions and alternatives to improve practice.
As it is the case here in Bahrain, supervision tutorials were only conducted orally. That is, both Bachelor (B. Ed.) and PGDE students receive only verbal comments upon their observed lessons then informed by their final grades at the end of their teaching practice course (BTC-Teaching Practice Guide, 2011).
As it can be inferred from the above that almost all the feedback comments teaching practice students receive currently are in the shape of verbal/oral feedback. There is no written report that those teacher candidates can receive and refer to when they want to identify particular technical mistakes they might have done during their observed lesson or train on a specific teaching technique that could suit the design of their intended lesson. On the other hand, the situation where oral feedback only is given to those in-service teachers has been challenging to the university supervisor too. Personally speaking, I have always been complaining that my students are not developing in the way they should because they either do not take the comments I provide to them into action or because they forget most of what I had discussed with them by the end of the post-lesson conference.

Research Problem
During my supervision of PGDE students in their TP1 (n=16), I noticed that few (n=4) in the group were considering my feedback in their teaching, while the others (n=12) were not. Initially, I ignored the matter; however, the issue was of concern after my third evaluative visit to them as the overall average score of performance for those students did not exceed 75%, which is normally perceived as low in this type of courses in the study's context. Therefore, and in consideration of the literature reviewed above, I attempted to improve those students' teaching performance in their TP1 and develop their professional skills by changing my supervision style and giving structured written feedback those students in addition to the normal oral feedback they used to receive. Based on this, this study attempts to investigate the effectiveness of this practice by responding to the following question: To what extend is providing structured written feedback reports effective to in-service ELT trainees in developing their teaching skills?

Participants
The participants were 16 PGDE students from cohort 3 and 4 whom I was supervising as their university supervisor during their teaching practicum. These teacher candidates were novice teachers of English in the government schools in the Kingdom of Bahrain who were sent back to the university to join the PGDE programme -English speciality as part of their INSET programme at BTC. All those participants were females (n=15) with one male and their professional experience ranged between one to two years. In addition, they all were university graduates holding a B.A in English language and literature and they all were not educationally oriented.

Methodology
This is an action research that adopts the interpretive paradigm while investigation. My decision to use interpretive methodology sprang from the ontological belief that "people's knowledge, understandings, interpretations, experiences and interactions are meaningful properties of their reality" (Mason, 1996, p. 38). The most legitimate way to generate data in accordance to these ontological properties was to gain access to the participants' accounts. I used open-ended questionnaires in the first phase of my study firstly, because it offered me the opportunity to cover a range of topics I had on my agenda, and secondly, because open-ended questions, as Oppenheim (1996) points out, give freedom to the participants to express their thoughts in their own words uninfluenced by a predetermined set of replies.

Significance of Study
This study is important as it tries to shed light on the current practices conducted in the supervision process during the teaching practice course and attempts to improve these practices through reflection and development of new ies.ccsenet.org International Education Studies Vol. 11, No. 9;2018 practices. Further, it aims to support the university supervisor to be more involved in the actual reality of teaching and learning by making the feedback given to the teaching practice students more contextualized and representative of their teaching context.

Design
According to Mertler (2006), action research is a "cyclical not linear process in which three to four stages should be followed. They are the acting stage (cycle 1), the developing stage (cycle 2) and finally the reflecting stage (seeking further improvement)" (p. 23).
Based on the above, this study consists of 3 cycles. The first cycle represents the change of the traditional norm of practice followed in supervising PGDE students in their TP1 course at BTC by introducing another type of my feedback that is structured written feedback reports to those supervisees. According to the actual official supervision policy in the TP courses when this study was conducted, there is a definite number of class visits the university supervisor has to do for his/her student teachers in their schools, in which he/she has to observe an actual lesson performed by them. After observing the lesson, he/she conducts a post-conference with his/her students to provide them with his/her feedback on the performed lesson and asks for some further improvements the student teachers have to show in the next visit. This supervision policy which was at the time of this study did not require or ask for any other sort of supervision, such as giving written comments or structured reports to the students about their observed lessons. The supervision policy was limited to providing oral feedback only to the supervised students by their supervisor during their post-conference in addition to an evaluation of the observed students. In this research, sixteen PGDE students were supervised in the traditional way while they were in their TP 1during the first month of their practicum. All those students were exposed to the official policy of supervision by providing them with the normal required feedback about their performance inside the classroom that was oral feedback only.
Cycle one started in the second month when visit 3 was due to those particular students. In visit 3, the teachers were observed in class then provided with both an oral feedback on their performance in class and short written comments handed to them at the end of the post-conference. The procedure was developed and extended to the third month but with a new group of PGDE students who were taking their teaching practice at that time. This can be considered cycle three in this research.
In cycle two, the observed teachers were given oral feedback on their observed lessons during the post-conference and later they were sent a structured written report about their class visit including suggestions for improvement. Since I had almost an everyday contact with those teachers, I managed to send every one of them his/her report after one day of our post-conference. More, it enabled me to give those teachers open-ended questionnaires and make interviews with them to investigate their views on the new approach of providing them with written feedback report of their performance. In this way, I had the advantage of personal contact and the opportunity to provide further information where needed. Nevertheless, the questionnaires were accompanied by a letter where the purpose of the study was explained and the confidentiality regarding the data and the participants' identities was guaranteed.
Cycle three was the stage in which the analysis of the questionnaire data and the semi-structured interviews responses were analyzed and reflected upon. I chose semi-structured interviews because, like open-ended questionnaires, they offered me the opportunity to cover the range of topics I had on my agenda with the additional advantage that they enabled me to make on-the-spot assessments and follow up on specific responses in the narrative or sequence provided by the participants. The study was piloted once with three students and piloting revealed the need for some questionnaire items to be rephrased in order to become more understandable.
In order to organize, retrieve and analyze the interview data, I went through the respondents' replies and identified broad categories from fragments of the participants' words that had common elements. Then, I grouped the data under each category and went through them again to identify sub-categories. I also cross-referenced the questionnaire and interview data seeking new relations among them. This procedure enabled me to link all the data fragments to particular ideas or concepts, which resulted in the final categorization in the data (Guba and Lincoln, 1989). To ensure the validity and reliability of the questionnaire, a copy of it was sent for review and validation by other faculty colleagues who were supervising in the programme. Their responses showed an agreement of 85% with most of the questionnaire items. In addition, all their suggestions and adjustments were considered to facilitate the participants' responding process to the questionnaire's items (Dornyei, 2003). Regarding reliability, the Alpha Cronbach factor was calculated through using SPSS software. The obtained result is (0.902) and this indicates the reliability of the questionnaire items and their relevance to the topic under investigation in this study.

Data Analysis
I analysed the data by calculating the frequency of the participants' responses for each category included in the questionnaire. Data from the interviews were content analysed by breaking down the participants' answers into categories.

Limitations of the Study
This is a small-scale study that is limited to twelve novice English language teachers (ELT) in government schools in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Therefore, the results found cannot be generalised very far as they do not reflect the whole population of the society studied. However, it provides an insight into what beginner ELTs need in their INSET and opens horizon towards in-depth research in this area. This limits the findings to the context of the novice teachers of English.

Results and Discussion
The results of the study are analysed from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives:

Questionnaire Findings
The frequencies were calculated for the four main areas included in the questionnaire, namely benefits of written feedback, quality of supervisor's written comments, practicality or utilisation of written feedback and the type of written feedback presented to the supervisees. Table 1 summarises the distribution of the frequencies scored for each area: As it is shown above, the majority of the study participants (n=14) found written feedback more helpful in supplying them with clear instructions, which they can follow to ensure a successful start of the lesson. One justification for this response could be the fact that achieving successful introduction to the lesson plays a fundamental role for those teachers to stimulate their students' attention and make them more involved in the lesson, especially when it is acknowledged that those teachers are just a replacement of the original teachers who were viewed as more experienced and knowledgeable about their classes. This shall positively affect those novice teachers' control over their classroom which requires them to make it more communicative and interactive in order to achieve sufficient practice of the target taught language, which is English. This also justified in the way those participants see how written feedback enables them more to monitor their students' interaction especially the level ies.ccsenet.org International Vol. 11, No. 9;2018 of students' interaction during English lesson has always been a major concern for many of those teacher whom I had been supervising. Another advantage that all the participants (n=16) agreed to gain from receiving written feedback on their visited lessons is the accurate guidelines and corrections they receive to develop their way of constructing and writing their lesson objectives/aims. This could be linked to items (4) & (5) in the questionnaire in which the participants indicate their agreement on the effectiveness of written feedback in providing them with clear view of how their lessons went and where the areas of weaknesses that they should consider for improvement in future. In fact, an over view on the participants' responses reflect their total satisfaction of getting written reports about their practice and their preference to this practice on the part of their university supervisor or mentor than just an oral conversation. However, it is worth to note that those participants were very concerned about the nature of the content that their written reports contain. As indicated in the questionnaire, only five participants found their written reports include positive comments (item 10) while the majority (n=11) considered oral feedback to focus more on the positive feedback than negative feedback. This might indicate that although written feedback could be accurate and clear in directing teacher candidates' performance, it might also make these teachers less motivated to teaching.

Interview Findings
Following the methodology described in section four regarding analysing the interview responses, the respondents' responses were content analysed and classified in thematic categories for discussion and analysis as in the following: ended up with the categories presented in Table 2  TCs perceived the written reports they received on their observed lessons as a useful resource for them, whatever form these reports took since they believed that these reports provide them with specific and detailed comments on their performance. This view was echoed in most of the respondents' responses:

"[T]he post lesson conference is too general and I do not received precise instruction on what I have to." (Teacher5)
Others stressed that written feedback is better than oral tutorial because in addition to its precise addressing of the "weaknesses areas in their teaching" (Teacher 7), it is an important "source of documentation" (Teacher 3) and "filing" (Teachers 4, 3, & 9) for their teaching development. In fact, most of those respondents found their written feedback provided by their supervisor a useful content to include in their teaching files, which they had to submit by the end of their teaching practice course. One reason for this perception could be how these reports show the progress of the teacher candidate and what improvement he/she had succeeded to make:

"I and colleagues [6 TCs teaching in the same school] decided to include our written feedback reports in our teaching file so that officials at the MOE see the work and progress we have made in our teaching practice." (Teacher 2)
In the same regard, some found written reports as an extra evaluation tool that could be used beside the evaluation form, which they found as not accurate enough to enhance their teaching skills. Teacher 9 stated this clearly:

"I like written feedback reports because they make me feel that the evaluation sheet is no more the main communication channel between my university supervisor and me."
Generally, however, TCs expected both oral discussion and written feedback to be more sufficient to assist them assess their performance and identify areas of weaknesses and strength:

" I think that written feedback helps to improve my teaching skills and the oral tutorial also informs you directly if your teaching technique was correct or not and comments on your performance and your methods." (Teacher 1)
However, another TC went to say that: "Brief ideas written on paper may be very bief and difficult to be understood by the TC. Sometimes oral elaboration makes these points easier to comprehend." (Teacher 8) Overall, though the majority of the respondents welcomed the new practice or written feedback as more useful to them than oral tutorial, many of them expressed their concern about the possibilities for misunderstanding that might arose from written questions. Many of them in this regard expressed that their written reports did not make explicit what their supervisor meant until they had their second oral tutorial with him. Teacher 11 explained this in detail:

"Sometimes I felt I didn't understand what exactly my supervisor wanted. And other times I
ies.ccsenet.org Vol. 11, No. 9;2018 felt that I had questions but couldn't ask to my supervisor." On a different aspect, the interview responses revealed that there was an assumption in the written comments/feedback provided to the respondents that the purpose of these written reports is evaluation (in many cases they called it a 'performance assessment report'), but the general perception was that giving feedback was more preferred by the trainee teachers and this is justified in the following reasons: This goes with the fact that all those teacher candidates, who did the questionnaire, consider written feedback they receive from their university supervisor as more effective on their teaching practices since they represent a summative evaluation for their performance (Spear et al., 1997, p. 278).
Yet, a concern was emphasized here about whether the provided written feedback should be given to the TCs immediately after the lesson or provided later for the teacher candidates for their review and reflection. As one TC commented:

"I believe it is better for me to receive my feedback immediately because I can read them whenever I am free during my teaching day and I can decide what aspects I should focus on." (Teacher 12)
In fact, most TCs received their reports after one week of their visits due to the number of the TCs the supervisor had to cover (n=10), meaning that it was impossible for him to send TCs their reports immediately after the visits because he was busy in visiting other TCs in other schools. Another reason could be added to this is the supervisor's intention of giving those TCs more time to practice some self-reflection on their performance to compare it later with their reports.

Format of the Written Report-'Despite Its Shape, It Was Useful'
The study respondents revealed an acceptance of the format in which their written feedback was presented. In fact, it was noticeable the preference of those TCs to the structured format of their reports. As some TCs mentioned: "The report sections lead me easily to the points I am concerned about more -it also make me more focused on the points I am good at and the others I am not in." (Teacher 5) Another said: "The categorisation and sections made in the report helped me to prepare for my next lesson." (Teacher 16) However, it seems that the majority of the TCs did not perceive the written feedback/reports as a formative tool, which they should use for seeking continual progress in teaching skills. Instead, many of them viewed it as an evaluation to their performance. This was revealed in their responses when they were asked about if they would like it to be an official document they should receive while they are in their teaching practice programme: "The report should include a section that assesses teaching performance, lesson planning and designed activities …. etc." (Teacher 2) Another suggested providing broad assessment: "Any section in the report should include three assessment categories: acceptable, satisfactory, and insufficient." (Teacher 11) Others preferred to form the report into an "ultimate open-ended blank sheet" (Teacher 9) on which "the supervisor ies.ccsenet.org International Vol. 11, No. 9;2018 writes whatever he/she chooses." (Teacher 9) At this point, it appears that these responses reflect a conflict between the desire to standardise and structure written feedback and the desire to allow for more flexibility by allowing the supervisor decided what and how to write his/her feedback report on the part of this study respondents. To some extent, this reflects an overwhelming among those respondents towards to what extend the given feedback should act as either, an assessment of performance or as a means for future development. I can understand at this stage why those TCs stressed on this as reports with specific domains can help those novice teachers with the different styles of supervision that are carried out by different supervisors to focus on specific teaching qualities in each visit. In addition, it can help them standardise and systematise the method of providing feedback by these supervisors to their supervisees. The disadvantage, however, is that this standardisation of giving feedback might limit those TCs right to negotiate or discuss very specific aspects raised in a particular lesson.

'The Fruit'-Did It Worth?
All the study respondents reported that getting written feedback and reports on their performance during their teaching practice course was a good opportunity for sharing thoughts, views, feelings and beliefs about profession-related concerns. This was illustrated in one of the respondents' response: "When I feel not sure enough about my intended practice or the actions I took with my students, I invite my colleagues who are doing their TP with me in the same school and share this with them…" (Teacher 8) In the interviews, the TCs said that they found themselves able enough to handle their teaching skills, such as "stating objectives" (Teacher 3), "shifting from teacher-centred to student-centred lesson" (Teacher 16), and "developing classroom discourse and design of materials" (Teacher 15). They also mentioned that written feedback helped them to potentially debilitating reluctance towards teaching and becoming more confident in managing their lessons and handling their students' interactions. As it was commented by one of them: "Now I can improve my teaching skills as my supervisor provided me with practical suggestions." (Teacher 7) Clarke and Collins (2007) find that post lesson conference is often under-communicated because it usually follows the one-way communication not two-way communication. This did not happen in my case when I used written feedback with my supervisees. I can argue at this point that my new practice in supplying my teaching practice students with written feedback played a fundamental role in shaping those novice teachers' identities. This is simply because TCs learnt that the mixture of uncertainty and confidence, of success and failure will let them practise analysing performance and reflecting on actual practices, which will eventually lead them to develop as professional teachers (Dysthe et al., 2006).
All in all, it could be claimed that this practice empowered the TCs in the way it supplied them by first linking theory to practice and second by developing their professional knowledge about their actual teaching context: "The difference between oral conference and written feedback is that written feedback equip us with deeper professional knowledge … it also enabled us to come up with new thoughts …" (Teacher 3)

Conclusion
Regardless of the format, style and content of the written reports that were given to the supervisees, all the teacher candidates in this study showed their preference and support to this practice. Certain more structured format, however, will tend to include more analysis and directions to guide the trainees in their future practice. It may be that those TCs had a definite pre-perception about how written feedback was supposed to be led them to stress on having more structured report. Yet, it is possible that they were influenced by the format and categories of the evaluation form which was used in their previous teaching practice courses.
In addition to the format, another aspect can be concluded from the study findings that would influence this practice in future supervision that is evaluation or assessment. As it was revealed in the interviews, many respondents suggested in the interviews reported above to include a clear statement of evaluation of the TC's observed lesson. Here, I think in future TCs should be clarified that the purpose of giving them written feedback beside the oral conference is not to evaluate them but to guide them through out their teaching. The findings discussed in this study do support that written feedback and comments encouraged the participants to reflect more on their teaching specifically when their comments are shaped in form of headlines or questions. As John and Gilchrist (1999) point out in their study that the quality of reflection can be improved by the amount of the ies.ccsenet.org International Vol. 11, No. 9;2018 generated questions that promote for reasoning about definite teaching practices.
To conclude, other conclusions have been reached in this study that TCs want detailed written feedback, including recommendations, and critical concerns that motivate their reflection and thinking, which they can refer to during their practical practice. They prefer to obtain these written feedbacks after the performance of their teaching, but the written feedbacks also need to be associated with oral conference discussion, where issues can be explained directly. Generally, I think this research has opened the door for me to conduct more research in this area especially on the different styles of writings that could be useful to the TCs to understand and follow while they are in their teaching practicum.    This questionnaire is a part of a research study of EL teacher education and training. This study investigates the effectiveness of written feedback in improving the supervision process during the Teaching practice course.

Teaching
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