Designing Personas- a New Approach to TESOL Microteaching Practice

Marren, A. (2023) Designing Personas- a New Approach to TESOL Microteaching Practice. In: IATEFL 55th International Conference & Exhibition, Belfast, UK, 17-20 May 2022, ISBN 9781912588435

Abstract

One of the common criticisms of microteaching practice on teacher training programmes is the inauthenticity of the task (He &Yan, 2011). While students appreciate the opportunity to plan and teach lessons, they often comment on the challenges of planning a lesson for an imaginary group of learners and having to teach it to their peers who act as learners. This has also been my experience as a teacher trainer on an intensive one-year MSc TESOL programme. My students often comment on the difficulties of acting as language learners and the challenges of designing lesson plans for an imagined group of learners. Therefore, the lesson plans produced by the trainee teachers often do not successfully demonstrate an understanding of the teaching context and present a homogenous picture of a target learner. This then leads to problems in teaching e.g. insufficient time for task completion or grading of language. To address these issues, I have used the concept of personas from the User Centred Translation theory (Suojanen et al., 2014) where personas are defined as ‘imaginary characters who represent real user groups’ (ibid. p.70) and in the context of this project are the students.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Marren, Mrs Aneta
• Authors: Marren, A.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Modern Languages and Cultures
• ISBN: 9781912588435
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2023 The Author
• First Published: First published in IATEFL 2022 Belfast Conference Selections
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced with the permission of the Author

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