English Trainees' Opinions on Professional Development and Pre-Service Education

The purpose of the present study is twofold; it finds out Turkish EFL teacher trainees' opinions and perceptions of their pre-service education, and explores how the trainees will improve themselves and catch up the latest development once they become teachers. Additionally, the participants were asked two open-ended questions which also explores their opinions on the same topic. The emerging themes of these questions were categorized. Descriptive statistics was used to analyse the data. The subjects of the study include 214 EFL teacher trainees. The data was collected through a survey developed by the researchers. The results shows that the trainees are apt to confer with their experienced colleagues, have peer observation, attend teacher training seminars and take a central exam to examine their knowledge of profession and keep them up-to-date. Also, the trainees asserted that they are happy with the length of the teaching practice but not with the content.