INTRODUCTION

Practice teaching is a part of most teacher education programs in language teaching and is intended to provide a link between the academic courses you studied in your university or other institutional TESOL program and the “real” world of teachers and students in a language-learning classroom (Brenes-Carvajal 2009; Farrell 2007). Many teachers find their practice-teaching experience to be one of the most useful courses they took during their teacher preparation, as these teachers confirm:

Practice teaching serves a number of goals (Baird 2008). Perhaps the most obvious one is for you to have an opportunity to apply some of the things you have studied in your academic and teacher-training courses. Your coursework will have included not only the theoretical knowledge expected of today's language teachers – often derived from courses in areas such as second language acquisition, linguistics, and discourse analysis – but also the practical knowledge derived from coursework in areas such as methodology, materials design, and language assessment.