Academic reflective writing or anecdotal storytelling: a study on pre-service EFL teaching portfolios

Teacher trainees are familiarised with various genres during their studies; however, the teaching portfolio and the thesis are the ones in the focus of their university years. The present study aims at investigating student teachers' writing and reflective skills by analysing reflective writings as compulsory documents of teaching portfolios. Altogether 20 reflective writings are examined in the study to shed light on trainees' writing competences and main themes in the focus of their writings. For the analysis, four software programs were used: VocabProfile VP-Compleat, Coh-Metrix 3.0 Easability Assessor, Coh-Metrix 3.0 Web Tool, and NVivo. The findings of the study reveal that teacher trainees need to improve their academic language use and genre awareness since results show simple sentence structures and a high ratio of familiar words in the samples. Moreover, genre awareness should be a crucial element of the curriculum in English studies to arm students with appropriate knowledge and text-creating competences.