The Early Years of Teaching: A Cross-Cultural Study of Turkish and Polish Novice English Teachers

Abstract

Given the importance of novice teacher experiences and their long-term effects in the field, this crosscultural exploratory study investigates the challenges of 34 novice Turkish and Polish English teachersand how they develop their professional understanding in the early years of teaching. The participantswere non-native novice English teachers working with K-12 learners in culturally, socially, economicallyand historically diverse regions of Turkey and Poland. The data collected simultaneously in bothcountries in the spring term of the 2016-17 academic year were generated from two sources: a) criticalincidents of the novice teachers, and b) online and/or oral interviews with these teachers, followed bycomprehensive cyclical data analysis. The challenges related to pedagogical and sociocultural factorsinfluenced the way the teachers teach in their contexts. The findings suggest that creating interactiveand reflective learning contexts for novice teachers will help them better adapt to their new schoolsettings and develop professionally.© 2019 EJAL & the Authors. Published by Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (EJAL). This is an open-accessarticle distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND)(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).