Foreign language

Online Tools in Teacher Education to Promote Reflection

Utilizing technology both in pre-service and in-service teacher education, including in teaching English as a foreign or second language departments, is becoming increasingly more prevalent in order to promote teachers‟ reflective practices. Their use enables teachers and teacher candidates to easily continue their professional development. Through distance education, they are able to pursue their career via online platforms without the restrictions of time and place. The most common technological tools for reflective practices include using chat or Internet Relay Chat (IRC), blogs, electronic dialogue journals via e-mails, and online asynchronous discussion forums.

Chat or Internet Relay Chat

The word chat, or more technically, Internet relay chat, can be defined as “a

mode that allows people to talk to each other online in real time” (Farr & Riordan, 2014, p. 2). Chat discussions are useful sources for education because they provide similar discourse to spoken discussions due to their written format in a synchronous platform (Lammy&Hampel, 2007 as cited in Farr & Riordan, 2014).

However,Meskill (2009) claims that the use of synchronous discussions create a messy environment in which participants frequently write off-topic information and create lower quality discussions, a situation which happens less likely in asynchronous discussions.
Another 2009 study supports Meskill‟s (2009) claim about the disorganized features of online synchronous discussions. Chen, Chen and Tsai (2009) conducted a study on sixty-one public school teachers who were participating in an in-service professional development program called Alternative Assessment for Mathematics Teaching. The participants were asked to describe their experiences throughout six online synchronous discussions. They posted 3600 messages, which constituted the first section for the study‟s data. Following these discussions, the researchers conducted interviews with 10 participants in order to analyze their perceptions about these synchronous discussions. The results of the study showed that although the researchers received a large amount of data, especially at the beginning and the end of the discussions, most of these chat conversations were based on social messaging in the form of dialogues. Most of the chat messages showed a lack of cognitive or metacognitive skills. They concluded that the content of the discussions and the quality of the shared information was not more superior than face-to-face conversation.
In examining the few studies that exist in the literature on the use of synchronous discussions for reflective practice, it can be concluded that the

application of synchronous discussions to promote professional development cannot be regarded as effective in fostering reflective practices; instead they result in disorganized interactions or dialogues of participants on social issues.