ABSTRACT
When English teachers start teaching, they are expected to translate what they have learned from their training into real-life classroom practices. However, the transition from teacher trainee to in-service teacher can be a “dramatic and traumatic” process. Apart from this “reality shock”, novice teachers face additional challenges, such as globalization, constantly advancing technology, societal mobility, and migration, as well as increased violence and terrorism across the world. Turkey is a country in which these difficulties manifest differently across regions, largely due to issues of socioeconomic disparities among regions: The western part of the country is more developed than the eastern and southeastern regions. This chapter investigates the challenges experienced by novice in-service English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers and the strategies they employed to cope with these problems. EFL teacher training programs in Turkey offer courses on teaching pedagogy, content knowledge, and general culture in the curriculum.
