CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONS
Classroom practices are mostly conducted by means of teachers’ skill and knowledge of coordination,
cooperation, organization and motivation. Teacher educators need to create opportunities and facilitate
experiences that will develop the pre-service teacher’s capacity to reflect on his/her practice (Frick, Carl &
Beets, 2010). This can be considered as a key factor to promote learner autonomy, self-directed learning, and thus to facilitate developing metacognitive learning strategies. In many educational contexts evaluating student teachers’ academic achievements is unlikely to be provided through standardized self-assessment descriptors. In most cases individual trainers have their own distinctive criteria to evaluate the success of their students based on their personal understanding of “priorities” for a good foreign language teacher. In this study the result of the data analysis has revealed the facts that;
a. student teachers of languages are in need of space and time to reflect on their achievements so that they
personally experience self-directed learning as autonomous learners, and become teachers who can also
provide autonomous learning facilities for the students in their future classes,
b. the EPOSTL is a useful self-assessment tool to help student teachers reflect on the progress and
potential of their learning and teaching,
c. student teachers of languages can familiarize themselves with the Common European Framework of
Reference for Languages and the European Language Portfolio oriented foreign language teaching
practices when they personally experience using the EPOSTL as a standard European self-assessment
tool,
d. as the EPOSTL holders, student teachers of languages become efficient users of the Europass
documentation system, and create their own Europass CV, Europass Language Passport and the
supplementary documents even before they graduate from their department.
It can also be suggested that besides educating student teachers of languages in the higher
education system in accordance with the principles and the guidelines developed by the Council of
Europe, teachers in the system should be trained to use the CEFR and the ELP-based foreign language
teaching practices in their classes by valuing autonomous learning, self-assessment and cultural
diversity in a lifelong learning perspective. For this purpose it is also possible to develop a
“Professional Portfolio for Teachers of Languages” through which foreign language teachers can reflect
on and self-evaluate their linguistic, communicative, intercultural and language teaching skills during
their professional life. This will enable them to become autonomous teachers who are aware of their
personal and professional strengths and weaknesses as well as to avoid the risk of becoming “slaves of
the bureaucratic system”. Additionally, there is research evidence to show that the impact of ICT on
educational activities gives rise to success in a variety of contexts (Aristovnik, 2012; Agostinho, 2005).
Although the EPOSTL can be downloaded and printed out as a hard copy document, it is a fact that the
use of the EPOSTL descriptors in digital form can save time and be economical and easily accessible
for the students. It could also be a convenient way for student teachers or teachers in schools to keep
records of self-observation and evaluation in their computers as a digital file, allowing them to see their
own progress within a particular period of time. It could therefore be practical and environmentally
friendly to make use of an online version of the portfolios as an E-EPOSTL for student teachers, and to
develop a similar tool for teachers of foreign languages as well.