The possibility of teaching practices as a community of practice based upon the experiences of student-teachers

In pre-service training for teachers of English opportunities for dialogic interaction (Skidmore and Murakami, 2017) with a mentor are seen to play an important role in professional awareness and development (Wallace, 1993; Gabryś-Barker, 2012; Howard and Donaghue, 2015). To fulfil the demands of their practices student-teachers work with a number of different people: a school teacher (mentor), aca-demic supervisor and the academic staff who lead the English teach-ing methodology course (Blaszk, 2015). This being the case, it was hypothesized that teaching practices might exist as a community of practice within which student-teachers in interaction with these different people would be supported in their professional development. The aim of the qualitative research reported in this paper was to discover how the student-teachers in a particular institution perceived their teaching practices and whether or not those practices could be viewed as a community of practice that supported the students.