Investigating the Level of Challenges Faced by Students During Short-Term English Teaching Practicum at Elementary Schools

Abstract

INDAH NURUL HASNA, 2130104030 entitled: “INVESTIGATING THE LEVEL OF CHALLENGES FACED BY STUDENTS DURING SHORT-TERM ENGLISH TEACHING PRACTICUM AT ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS ”, English Teaching Department, Faculty of Tarbiyah and teacher Training, State Islamic University (UIN) Mahmud Yunus Batusangkar 2025. Short-term teaching practicum often poses significant challenges for students, particularly when they are assigned to teach English at the elementary school level. This study focused on the challenges faced by students during English short-term teaching practicum at elementary schools. The aim was to describe these level of the challenges both in general and in particular aspects: cognitive development, motivation, attention, multi-level group, and management of classroom. This research used a descriptive quantitative approach with cross-sectional design. The population of this research consisted of 22 students from the English Teaching Department at UIN Mahmud Yunus Batusangkar who took the English for Young Learners course in the 2023/2024 academic year and conducted practice teaching at elementary school as the final project of the course. All members of the population were used as the sample. To collect the data, a closed-ended questionnaire consisting of 46 items was used as the research instrument. The questionnaire was constructed based on relevant theories by Nunan (2010) and Linse (2005). The instrument was validated by two experts using expert judgements, percent agreement and CPE. The validation results showed that the instrument could be used after minor revisions and the instrument was valid for data collection. The reliability was tested using two methods: Cohen’s kappa resulted in 0/0 due to no variation in responses and Cronbach’s Alpha was 0.963 indicating that the questionnaire is highly reliable . After that, the questionnaire was distributed to the respondents via Google Forms. In analyzing the data, descriptive statistics and Microsoft Excel were used. The findings revealed that the level of challenges faced by students during practice teaching English at elementary school in general is challanging. For five aspects cognitive development, motivation, attention, multi-level group, and classroom management were also categorized as challenging.