UNIVERSITY-LEVEL REFLECTIVE WRITING, ANALYZING THE INTERNSHIP REPORTS OF STUDENTS OF FRENCH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Reflective writing is an important aspect, especially for students who are majoring in teaching a foreign language, because it constitutes an initial step for finding a solution to problems arising in practice. Reflectivity in writing can be acquired by working since the first cycle studies, even in the pre-university system but in the Albanian context, it is not always realized from one level to another. This paper will focus on reflectivity in writing by means of internship reports handed by students at the end of their two-month internship in middle and secondary schools. The corpus consists of the internship reports of the last two years (2011-2013) submitted by 80 master's students, in order to point out that the students' reflection on their internship in various schools are not realistic due to their inability to express their viewpoint on their experience. The main results of the analysis indicate that the students fail to coherently organize the data according to the internship report's structure and they cannot explain accurately the problems encountered in the Albanian context. Instead, in most of the cases, they depart from an ideal context found in various foreign authors' works. They are unable to argue on the importance of teaching experience for exercising their future profession. Furthermore they display several deficiencies in describing sample classes that they have taught in the schools.