INTRODUCTION

Many teacher educators, teachers, students, administrators, and even novice teachers themselves assume that once novice teachers have graduated, they will be able to apply what they have learned in teacher-preparation programs during their first year of teaching. However, the transition from the teacher-education program to the first year of teaching has been characterized as a type of “reality shock” (Veenman 1984: 143); the ideals that novice teachers may have formed during the teacher-education program are often replaced by the realities of the social and political contexts of the school. One reason may be that teacher education programs are unable to reproduce environments similar to those teachers face when they graduate. Consequently, many novice teachers are left to cope on their own in a “sink-or-swim” situation (Varah, Theune, and Parker 1986). This chapter examines the challenges that novice second language teachers face in their first years in the classroom and outlines how these challenges can be addressed in language teacher education to better prepare novice teachers for the delicate transition from the teacher-education program to the first year of teaching. It first defines what is meant by the novice teacher and then discusses the topics of learning to teach, and the influences and challenges novice teachers that face during their first year.

SCOPE AND DEFINITIONS

Novice teachers, sometimes called newly qualified teachers (NQTs), are usually defined as teachers who have completed their teacher-education program (including the practicum) and have just commenced teaching in an educational institution. More than any other time in their careers, they are involved in the process of learning to teach, or as Doyle (1977) puts it “learning the texture of the classroom and the sets of behaviours congruent with the environmental demands of that setting” (p. 31). In the first years of teaching, their experiences are also mediated by three major types of influences: their previous schooling experiences, the nature of the teacher-education program from which they have graduated, and their socialization experiences into the educational culture generally and the institutional culture more specifically. Their schooling experiences include all levels of their education, from kindergarten, elementary, and high school, to university, and involve what Lortie (1975) refers to as an “apprenticeship of observation.”