37.2003, Reviews: Exploring the Principles of Reflective Practice in ELT: Bahar Gün, Evrim Üstünlüoğlu (eds.) (2023)

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Subject: 37.2003, Reviews: Exploring the Principles of Reflective Practice in ELT: Bahar Gün, Evrim Üstünlüoğlu (eds.) (2023)

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Date: 06-Jun-2026
From: Melissa Hauber-Özer [mhauber at missouri.edu]
Subject: Applied Linguistics: Bahar Gün, Evrim Üstünlüoğlu (eds.) (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34-1689

Title: Exploring the Principles of Reflective Practice in ELT
Subtitle: Research and Perspectives from Turkey
Series Title: Reflective Practice in Language Education
Publication Year: 2023

Publisher: Equinox Publishing Ltd
           http://www.equinoxpub.com/
Book URL: https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/exploring-principles-rp/

Editor(s): Bahar Gün, Evrim Üstünlüoğlu

Reviewer: Melissa Hauber-Özer

SUMMARY
In recent decades, reflective practice (RP) has become a cornerstone
of teacher education, widely promoted as a means of fostering
teachers’ professional growth, autonomy, and adaptability in complex
classroom contexts. While the concept traces back to John Dewey’s
(1933) notion of teachers learning from experience, it has been
developed in language education by scholars such as Thomas Farrell
(2019), who articulates RP as a holistic, evidence-based, dialogic
process that bridges principles and practices, demands an inquiring
disposition, and ultimately becomes a way of life for educators.
The volume Exploring the Principles of Reflective Practice in ELT:
Research and Perspectives from Turkey, edited by Bahar Gün and Evrim
Üstünlüoğlu, contributes to this contextualized understanding by
presenting a systematic review and six empirical studies on RP
conducted in Turkey. The book provides valuable insight into how
reflective practices are conceptualized, implemented, and experienced
in Turkish English language teaching (ELT), addressing pre-service
teacher education, in-service teacher education, and the professional
development (PD) of teacher educators themselves. The book begins with
a preface by series editor Farrell, followed by an introduction by the
volume editors, seven chapters, and a brief conclusion.
Foreword
Farrell’s preface establishes the theoretical framework of the book,
outlining his six principles of RP and providing an overview of the
chapters that follow. Farrell reminds readers that RP is not simply an
individual cognitive exercise but a holistic, evidence-based, dialogic
process that requires critical engagement with both personal practice
and broader social realities.
Introduction
The introduction by Gün and Üstünlüoğlu briefly traces the emergence
of RP in Turkish ELT, noting that reflective approaches are
increasingly embraced. The editors emphasize the variety of reflective
modalities explored in the book—digital reflection, collaborative
reflection, lesson study, reflective teaching programs, and trainer
self-reflection. They also provide an overview of the book’s
organization and summary of each chapter, which comprise a systematic
review, two chapters on pre-service teacher education, three on
in-service teacher education, and one on teacher educator reflection.
Chapter 1: Reflection and Collaboration in EFL Teacher Professional
Development in Turkey: A Systematic Review (Serhat Başar, Esat Kuzu, &
İrem Çomoğlu)
The first chapter offers a systematic review and meta-synthesis of 24
qualitative studies on collaborative RP in Turkish ELT between 2010
and 2021. The authors analyze research conducted in pre-service (9
studies), in-service (13 studies), and teacher educator (2 studies)
contexts, employing Braun and Clarke’s (2006) inductive approach to
thematic analysis. The findings suggest that collaborative RP –
including lesson study, teacher study groups, critical friends groups,
professional learning communities, and collaborative action research –
positively impact teachers’ professional growth, enhancing
instructional practices, collaboration skills, and reflective
awareness. The review also highlights challenges: teachers often lack
prior training in reflective thinking, and reflective tasks can be
time-consuming and procedurally demanding. The discussion connects
these findings to pre-service teacher education, where RP in practicum
courses helps candidates develop lifelong habits of reflection but
need to be introduced earlier in teacher education. For in-service
teacher education, the authors emphasize the limitations of top-down
PD and advocate for bottom-up, process-oriented models (Crandall,
2000; Johnson & Golombek, 2011). For teacher educators, the chapter
identifies a need to integrate reflective and inquiry-oriented skills
into their own practice.
Chapter 2: Pre-service EFL Teachers’ Reflective Thinking Levels and
Cognitive Presence in Online Learning: A Correlational Study (Ceyhun
Yükselir & Saadet Korucu-Kış)
This quantitative correlational study investigates the relationship
between reflective thinking and cognitive presence among pre-service
teachers engaged in online learning. Findings indicate above-average
levels of both reflective thinking and cognitive presence, with higher
scores for understanding and reflection and lower ones for habitual
action and critical reflection. Importantly, reflective thinking and
cognitive presence are positively correlated. The study’s implications
suggest integrating strategies such as role-plays, discussion forums,
and problem-solving tasks to strengthen cognitive presence and
reflective practice in online environments. The authors also recommend
explicitly teaching critical and abstract thinking skills, which are
underemphasized in Turkish education. While the chapter is
methodologically rigorous and presents clear results, some limitations
are evident. The lack of detail about the course content and
collaborative activities limits readers’ ability to assess how online
settings fostered reflective engagement. Moreover, the study took
place during the COVID-19 pandemic, when instructors and students
faced unusual stressors; this context likely influenced results but is
not fully acknowledged. Nonetheless, the study highlights the
potential of digital environments to cultivate reflection, an
especially relevant issue for the future of teacher education.
Chapter 3: Engaging in Systematic Digital Reflection: A Case of
Pre-Service English Teachers (Ali Öztüfekçi & Kenan Dikilitaş)
This chapter explores how digital reflective writing in an
asynchronous online course focused on testing and assessment shaped
the professional development of 45 pre-service EFL teachers. Drawing
on grounded theory, the authors conducted open, axial, and selective
coding of students’ weekly reflection papers and identified three
major outcomes: fostering autonomy, enhancing self-efficacy, and
developing professional identities. Students expressed greater
autonomy through exercising choice (e.g., preferring authentic
assessments), improved self-efficacy through self-regulation and
challenging previous assumptions, and evolving professional identities
defined by both “ideal” and “ought-to” selves. The findings are
compelling; yet the interpretation raises questions. The authors
support their claim that preservice teachers do not prefer online
courses using a very dated 2008 reference and attribute much of the
growth to the asynchronous course format, but similar reflective
writing tasks could have been integrated into face-to-face courses. It
is unclear why the course was delivered asynchronously, whether due to
COVID-19 or pedagogical design, leaving the reader uncertain about the
transferability of the findings. Nevertheless, the chapter highlights
the promise of structured digital reflection with instructor feedback
in supporting pre-service teachers.
Chapter 4: Reflective Practice Groups in ELT: An Emergent Model for
Professional Development (Burak Aydın & İrem Çomoğlu)
Turning to in-service teacher education, this chapter examines RP
groups as a model for collaborative PD. In this single instrumental
case study (Merriam, 2009), researchers provided five tertiary-level
academic English instructors with structured spaces to discuss
classroom experiences, share challenges, and use reflective tools to
analyze teaching practices over the course of 14 weeks. Through in
vivo coding and thematic analysis of extensive qualitative data
(journals, surveys, questionnaires, meeting recordings, and
observational field notes, visual artifacts, semi-structured
interviews, reflective essays, focus group interview), the authors
find that RP groups fostered community and collaboration, encouraged
dialogic reflection, and supported teacher agency and an action
orientation. Although the authors’ involvement in the process is not
thoroughly explained, the chapter provides a detailed and insightful
description of the process, supported by effective use of data
excerpts, and offer useful implications for future use of the model.
Chapter 5: Mediating Reflective Practice Through Lesson Study: The
Case of an EFL Teacher (Özgehan Ustuk & İrem Çomoğlu)
This chapter presents a single case study of one veteran teacher
engaged in lesson study (Dudley, 2015), a situated, reflective, and
bottom-up approach to PD enacted with a community of practice (Lave &
Wenger, 1991) through iterative development of instructional materials
to address a teaching challenge with four fellow teachers. The authors
employ the Douglas Fir Group’s (2016) transdisciplinary framework of
the multifaceted nature of language teaching and learning at nested
contextual levels: individual social (inter)actions (micro),
sociocultural institutions and communities (meso), and ideological
structures (macro). Applied to the researcher’s field notes,
participant audio-diaries, group and individual semi-structured
interviews (group and individual) about the experience through
discourse analysis, this framework illuminates how the process
facilitated opportunities to reflect on representations of power at
the meso- and macro-levels as well as individual teacher agency. The
authors show how lesson study can mediate reflective practice by
making teachers’ implicit beliefs explicit and open to critique. In
this way, it illustrates the adaptability of lesson study to Turkish
ELT and its potential as a tool for deep reflection.
Chapter 6: Payoffs and Pitfalls of Reflective Practice as Perceived by
Novice EFL Teachers (İlknur Bayram & Özlem Canaran)
This chapter explores novice teachers’ perceptions of a reflective
teaching and learning program, focusing on both benefits and
challenges. Conducted in a foundation (private) university’s foreign
languages department, this study took the form of a convergent mixed
methods design. Over the course of an academic year, 12 novice
instructors participated in three PD cycles per semester facilitated
by experienced ELT professionals, each recording a lesson and
identifying a focus for improvement through preparing, implementing,
and reflecting on an additional lesson with their facilitator and
small group of novice teachers. Based on analysis of reflective
reports, experience questionnaires, and focus group discussions,
novice teachers reported increased awareness, professional growth, and
improved practices as payoffs. However, they also identified pitfalls,
such as limited time, insufficient support, and difficulty sustaining
reflective habits. The findings underscore the ongoing tension between
the ideals of RP and the realities of institutional constraints,
highlighting the need for sustained support, mentoring, and realistic
expectations in early-career teacher development. This chapter is
particularly valuable for its inclusion of extensive appendices
providing reflective prompts and questionnaires for reader use.
Chapter 7: A Blended Reflection Cycle for Trainers: A Case Study
(Mehmet Haldun Kaya)
The final chapter shifts the focus to teacher educators, presenting a
single instrumental case study (Stake, 2005) of a trainer’s use of a
blended reflection cycle form developed by the author to improve PD
practices and reflective skills. Robust qualitative data collection
over the course of an academic year included recordings of online
training sessions, post-observation meetings, and interviews with
teachers who participated in the training, triangulated by the
trainer’s reflections captured in the form after each training
activity. These data were examined using content analysis, indicating
improvements in practice, which included shifts in the trainer’s
professional identity from a source of knowledge to an organizer of a
learning community, increasing engagement of participants through
collaborative and active learning methods, and better strategies for
managing the affective domain. The trainer also reported increasing
depth of reflections. There are some gaps in clarity, primarily that
the author seems to be the participant (using the terms trainer and
researcher interchangeably) but does not address this directly, and
the lack of description of the training content or focus. Regardless,
the chapter is noteworthy for addressing an often-neglected dimension
of RP, the professional learning of teacher educators, and including
the blended reflection cycle form for reader use. The chapter offers
transferrable insights into how trainers experience reflection, adapt
practices, and navigate identity development and enriches the volume
by extending the scope of RP beyond teachers to those who prepare
them.
Concluding Remarks
The editors conclude the volume by succinctly synthesizing the
findings across chapters, emphasizing the diversity of reflective
practices explored and the importance of context in shaping outcomes.
They reiterate that RP must be holistic, dialogic, and sustained,
echoing Farrell’s six principles, and highlight implications for
pre-service teachers, novice and experienced in-service teachers, and
teacher educators. Specifically, the editors emphasize the importance
of introducing critical reflection early in the teacher education
process and the role of collaboration in fostering this practice among
early-career teachers. They also acknowledge the challenges of
incorporating RP, including teachers’ lack of prior exposure to such
practices and time constraints, as well as the lack of RP research
among primary and secondary teachers and a need for additional studies
focused on teacher educators.
EVALUATION
This volume makes a significant contribution to the literature on
reflective practice in ELT, particularly by providing a sustained
focus on Turkey, a context that is often underrepresented in global
teacher education research yet demonstrates a firm and growing
emphasis on RP. Farrell’s six principles function as a unifying
framework, ensuring that diverse studies contribute to a common
theoretical conversation. Furthermore, the volume is comprehensive in
scope, covering pre-service, in-service, and teacher education
contexts, yet is concise and cohesive. Each chapter is based on
empirical evidence from actual classrooms and PD programs, lending
authenticity and practical relevance. In terms of application, the
inclusion of reflective breaks and reflection tools from the studies
transforms the book from a static collection of studies into an
interactive resource for readers. On the other hand, the book presents
mainly exploratory and descriptive qualitative studies conducted with
a small number of participants in higher education settings,
indicating a need for larger-scale and longitudinal studies as well as
research on RP among PK-12 teachers. Despite the critical nature of
RP, there is limited engagement with the broader socio-political and
institutional forces that shape teaching in Turkey, likely due to the
censorship of critical voices in that context. Similarly, the
pervasive global challenges teachers face, such as limited preparation
in critical thinking and systemic constraints on PD, are acknowledged
but not deeply interrogated.
Despite these limitations, the volume is an important resource for
teacher educators, researchers, and practitioners. It demonstrates
that reflective practice is not a one-size-fits-all model but a set of
adaptable approaches that must be tailored to local contexts. By
highlighting both the “payoffs and pitfalls” of RP in Turkish ELT, the
book offers lessons for other settings where reflective practice is
promoted but not always sustained. In sum, Exploring the Principles of
Reflective Practice in ELT: Research and Perspectives from Turkey
offers a timely and contextually rich examination of reflective
practice in English language teacher education. The volume succeeds in
documenting the diverse ways reflection is enacted, the benefits it
yields, and the challenges it faces in practice. Its greatest strength
lies in its ability to model reflective engagement through the variety
of approaches presented and tools provided. For those engaged in ELT,
whether as teachers, teacher educators, or researchers, this book is
both a mirror and a guide: a mirror reflecting the lived realities of
RP in Turkey, and a guide pointing toward more sustained, dialogic,
and holistic approaches to teacher learning worldwide.
REFERENCES
Crandall, J. (2000). Language teacher education. Annual Review of
Applied Linguistics, 20, 34–
55. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0267190500200032
Dewey, J. (1933). How we think: A restatement of the relation of
reflective thinking to the
educative process. DC Heath and Company.
Douglas Fir Group. (2016). A transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a
multilingual world. The
Modern Language Journal, 100(S1), 19-47.
Dudley, P. (2015). Lesson study: Professional learning for our time.
Routledge.
Farrell, T. S. C. (2019). Reflective practice in ELT. Equinox
Publishing.
Johnson, K. E., & Golombek, P. R. (2011). Research on second language
teacher education: A
sociocultural perspective on professional development. Routledge.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate
peripheral participation. Cambridge
University Press.
Merriam, S. B. (2009). Qualitative research: A guide to design and
implementation.
Jossey-Bass.
Stake, R. E. (2005). Qualitative case studies. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S.
Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage
handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 443–466). Sage
Publications Ltd.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Melissa Hauber-Özer is an Assistant Professor and Co-Director of
Qualitative Inquiry in the University of Missouri’s College of
Education and Human Development, where she instructs qualitative
research methods courses for graduate students. Melissa employs
critical and community-based participatory, ethnographic, and
narrative methodologies to examine issues of equity and access for
linguistically and culturally diverse learners in migration contexts.
Her recent work has been published in Gateways: International Journal
of Community Research and Engagement, RELC Journal, TESOL Journal, and
several edited volumes, and she co-edited The Routledge International
Handbook of Critical Participatory Inquiry in Transnational Research
Contexts.



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