Riyanti. Teaching Without....... TEACHING WITHOUT STUDENTS: EFL PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ EXPERIENCES TEACHING IN PANDEMIC TIME

Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, teaching and learning activities have changed dramatically. Within the Indonesian context, for example, beginning March 2020, the Indonesian government applied a social distancing policy. The situation forced both students and teachers to study and teach from home as the schools were closed to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus. This included how pre-service teachers learnt to teach. Intended to explore preservice English teachers’ experiences related to their teaching practicum in this pandemic time, this paper focuses on gaining in-depth information related to how the research participants view their experiences during a microteaching class at an Indonesian university. The study involved six pre-service teachers who took the microteaching class. The main data were collected from pre-service teachers through written reflection and from an open-ended questionnaire. In addition, recorded videos of participants’ teaching practices were also used to triangulate the data. Data analysis was qualitatively to see the emerging themes. The findings indicates that teacher candidates in the study view their microteaching experiences as both positive and negative ways. They consider it as a positive experience as they could have high confidence in teaching. It is a negative experience because they did not have experience managingthe classroom. Despite their mixed experiences, the participants in the study still consider their teaching practice experiences to be useful in preparing their teaching practicum at schools.

While there has been previous research highlighting the pre-service teachers' perspectives on microteaching (He & Yan, 2011;Şen, 2009), the studies took place in China and Turkey contexts respectively. While there has been previous research related to learning to teach in microteaching in an Indonesian context (Riyanti, 2020;Riyanti & Sarroub, 2016), there is still a dearth of research in microteaching experience in pandemic time. Thus, this current research addresses the gap by investigating the experiences of pre-service teachers who learn to teach in microteaching class during the pandemic time. Furthermore, since the pandemic has changed the way teaching and learning are structured, it is crucial to get insights into how teacher candidates view their experience during the pandemic.
While teaching practicum in university setting such as in microteaching class has long been a part of teacher education program in Indonesia, the investigation on how pre-service teachers learn to teach in this setting is scarcely done. Furthermore, as the pandemic started to hit Indonesia in early March 2020, the teaching and learning process changes dramatically.
Students and teachers were no longer allowed to meet face to face. The rapid spread of the coronavirus forced the government of Indonesia to make regulations to restrict the movement of people. As a result, teachers and students were advised to stay at home. All teaching and learning activities were done remotely. Students in the microteaching class who were supposed to practice teaching to their peers with the supervision of an instructor were no longer able to meet their peers face to face in the classroom settings. Looking at this situation, the instructor of the microteaching who was also the researcher of the current research changed the mode of microteaching class from an offline to an online mode. She assigned the six pre-service teachers in her microteaching class to video record their teaching performance. As the pre-service teachers have never taught their peers before, and that it was not possible to teach online among them, they were teaching to imaginary students in their video-recorded teaching performances.
Since this mode of microteaching is done for the first time in Tanjungpura university, it is important to know how the pre-service teachers view their learning to teach moments in university setting. Additionally, it is also important to know how this mode of teaching practice impact on the formation of teacher identity of the pre-service teachers. In particular, the current research seeks to answer the following research questions: How do pre-service EFL teachers view their teaching practicum during the pandemic time?

METHOD
The design of this research is a qualitative study in which the researcher is interested in gaining in depth information related to how the research participants view their teaching activities without having students during microteaching class and is framed by using activity theory. As the researcher is the instructor in microteaching class, she directly asked the preservice teachers to video record their teaching performance and asked them to reflect on each of their teaching moment.
The participants of the research involved six pre-service teachers who took Microteaching class. The information related to the participants is shown in Table 1.

Journal of English Educational Study (JEES) Volume 4 Issue 2 November 2021 Page 122-130 E-ISSN: 2655-0776
Riyanti. Teaching Without……. One of the main tools of data collection is written reflection by the participants. In applying this tool to collect the data, the researcher assigned pre-service teachers to write reflection on three teaching performances they did during microteaching time with the duration of 20-30 minutes. The open-ended questionnaire was distributed soon after the microteaching class ends to find out how they view their learning to teach in microteaching class which is done without having real students, the challenges that they face when teaching without real students, as well as how they identify themselves as teachers to be after practicing teaching without students.
The obtained data were then analyzed qualitatively. The data from students' written reflections and questionnaire were first read carefully. The next stage was codifying the data by putting labels which were then grouped into categories as the emerging themes were identified.
The recorded teaching performances were also transcribed and analyzed to triangulate the data from questionnaire and students' written reflection.

Findings
From analyzing student reflection and the result of the questionnaire at the end of the microteaching, it is found that pre-service teachers view teaching practicum in pandemic time as both positive and negative experiences. because there's no students in the class so that the presenter must be less nervous". In addition to being less nervous, the participants also consider teaching wit hout students makes them feel confident. FK, for example, mentions that "in teaching demonstration without students, I can be more confident and can also focus more material and I only imagine that students are real in front of me and also I can increase my potential by teaching without students. In the same vein, VS also claims, "For me it's a good starting before you face the real student because the situation would be so different.
The reason I like teaching without students because I feel more relaxed and I don't afraid if I make a mistakes while the learning process because I can retake or do it again and again till it's perfect".

b. Negative experience
Despite the positive experience, the participants in the study consider teaching without real students as a negative experience. One of the participants, for example, wrote: Teaching without students is difficult because the names of those who teach must have those who "teach" and those who are "taught". There is nothing that I like if teaching without students, because it looks boring and like people are confused, such as when teaching requires the response of students who are taught so that the teaching atmosphere does not become boring. (FF, questionnaire) As shown in the above excerpt, FF complains that teaching without students cannot be called as teaching. For her, pretending to face real teachers without having one is difficult and boring as there is no response from the students when teaching.
In a similar vein, other participants have negative impression on teaching without students. Partly because it is such a strange experience, and strange. In the questionnaire, HF wrote, "I have to speak for myself and when I ask no one to call, I feel very confused and strange. I have to turn on the atmosphere myself without any response from students".
In addition to the weirdness, other participants consider teaching without students is difficult especially for measuring students' understanding as explained by one of the participants below: it is hard for me to measure the students' understanding of my material delivery and also the lack of experience in gaining students' responses. It is indeed a challenge to have teaching demonstrations without having real students in front of me. I have to make plans for students' responses and Similar tone of experience is expressed by another participant, FF, wrote, "to be honest having teaching demonstrations without facing real students were quite challenging because even though I didn't face the real one, I still needed to be able to acts and faced them and performed as I really taught them." In the similar vein, other participants view teaching without students as a challenging. For KF, it is challenging because he had to imagine both the students and the class situation. He claims that he had hard time imagining students while he was trying to focus on the materials being taught.
Additionally, having no students' responses is another factor that make teaching without students challenging.

c. A mix of positive and negative experience
While some participants tend to consider teaching without students as mostly positive or negative, there are still participants who consider the experience as a mix of positive and negative. LA, for example, explicitly mentioned that the experience makes her feel both experiences. In the questionnaire, LA wrote: I think it's could be hard and easy. It's hard, in terms of when we teach students, we have to think about how students respond us. And it's easy because the demonstration is not done in class directly, so the presenter must be less nervous. Also, because we can prepare all of the things that we need, so that the activities based on lesson plan could be running good (LA, questionnaire) As indicated in the excerpt above, LA consider teaching without students as both hard and easy, indicating a mix of both positive and negative experience. In addition to LA, FF considers teaching without students makes her fearless and boost her confident, yet it also makes it hard for her to practice speaking to students as there are no responses. The situation makes her not sure whether she was right or wrong.

DISCUSSION
In relation to the experience of pre-service teachers in learning to teach during the pandemic time, the findings support previous research (Caires & Almeida, 2005) in which the teaching experience helps students become more skillful as a teacher to be. However, since the context of teaching practicum in the current study was different form the study by Caires and Almeida (2005), the benefits that the participants get is slightly different. Because the teaching practicum in the current study occurred during pandemic time where face to face interaction is not possible, the pre-service teachers did not have experience in managing classroom as in the Journal of English Educational Study (JEES) Volume 4 Issue 2 November 2021Page 122-130 E-ISSN: 2655 Riyanti. Teaching Without……. classroom where the participants meet the students face to face. Even so, the participants in the current study still view that their experience is beneficial for making them more prepared as teachers to be. For them teaching imaginary students made them more confident since they did not have to face the real students. Yet, they think their managing classroom skill is still insufficient.
In terms of the artificiality of the experience in microteaching as pointed out in the previous research by He and Yan (2011), the findings of this study somewhat confirms that.
However, in the current study, the participants consider teaching intended students when they taught their imaginary students. For example, when they practiced teaching junior high school, the participants were imagining that they have that level of students in front of them, not their peers in the university classroom. Thus, the way they taught the students was different teaching university students.

CONCLUSION
From the findings of the study, it can be concluded that preservice teachers have both positive and negative experience in having teaching practicum without students. However, two of six participants have a mix experience of it. They view the experience from both positive and negative side. In terms of the challenges they encounter during the teaching practicum, the participants mostly have challenge with teaching activities and in creating video recording of their teaching. In relation to the implications of their teaching practicum experience toward their teacher identity formation, the experience makes the participants aware of the unexpected teaching situations that they may encounter in their future teaching situations. The experience also makes them think critically and make use of technology as an alternative way of teaching in unexpected situations like Pandemic.
In line with the findings that pre-service teachers have both positive and negative experience related to teaching practicum without students, lecturers that handle microteaching class need to socialize this to upcoming pre-service teachers who are about to have microteaching class that teaching situations may change unexpectedly and that they have to be ready with that. In addition to the lecturers, future researchers should consider the findings of the current study. As the current study is narrow in scope and only involved six participants, further research involving more participants and larger study is important to be conducted in order to better understand how in-service teachers do reflection on their teaching.