Prospective English Language Teachers’ Opinions About Community Service Practices

Community service applications is a course provided by faculties of education in order to give the prospective teachers the chance to identify social problems related their field, develop project focused on social problems, analyze general needs of the society, become acquainted with public institutions, debate social problems, and develop positive attitude towards participating to community service practices. The aim of this study is to find out prospective language teachers’ teaching experiences and opinions about their community service applications. 20 prospective teachers from an English language teaching department of a state university participated in this qualitative study. The participants were given a semi-structured questionnaire with questions related to their teaching experience at a kindergarten. After 10 weeks and 10 hours of teaching experience the participants’ reports were analyzed according to content analysis approach. The results indicated that most of the participants developed positive attitudes towards teaching in such a public service and reported this activity as inspiring for their future teaching. The study concluded that more importance should be given to community service appliances since it is much helpful for prospective teachers’ teaching experiences and at the same time it provides opportunity for students to identify social related issues and hence develop a bridge between the university and the society