Novice EFL teachers' perceived challenges and support needs in their journey to become effective teachers

The present study aimed to describe the challenges as perceived by novice EFL teachers teaching in public primary and secondary schools and to identify their needs in relation to foreign language pedagogy and forms of professional assistance and guidance.Both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies were used in the present study.For a rich, vivid and elaborate description of the research issues under investigation, a variety of research instruments were employed in a triangulative manner. The data sources of the present study included semi-structured interviews, diary entries written by teachers throughout a school term, video-recorded classroom observations and stimulated recall interviews, and questionnaires used to gather a larger group of novice EFL teachers? perspectives. The participants of the present study were 104 novice EFL teachers who had a maximum of 4 years of teaching experience. The case study; on the other hand, were seven first year EFL teachers.It was a demanding task to analyse the voluminous qualitative data coming from a variety of sources. In order to sort these data into more manageable and meaningful units, constant comparison method (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) was used, which was a blend of inductive category coding involving a simultaneous comparison of all events observed and coded in the data. Data from the questionnaire were described and presented in the form of percentages.The present study yielded important information as to the novice EFL teachers? challenges and support needs in their initial years of teaching. As the results seemed to suggest, the novice EFL teachers started out their pedagogical journey in the midst of a myriad of competing and interacting difficulties in relation to classroom management, foreign language teaching and learning, and forms of professional support that were available to them. The results were discussed in relation to pre-service and in-service teacher education.