Paper short abstract:

This qualitative research study investigates beliefs, experiences and identity of three novice university lecturers in Portugal, focusing on their difficulties in their workplace and in their classroom.

Paper long abstract:

This qualitative research study investigates beliefs, experiences and identity of novice university lecturers in Portugal, focusing on their difficulties in their workplace and in their classroom. The research participants are 2 lecturers whose native language is Japanese and 1 lecturer who is a native speaker of Portuguese. All of them are novice teachers (part-time lecturers) who have been working for 2 years or less in the field of higher education. For data collection, we used exactly the same as Mukai (2016) who investigated beliefs and identity of novice Japanese lecturers of higher education in Brazil, that is, the online questionnaire which is composed of a written narrative and closed and open-ended questions and the follow-up e-mail. After collecting data, a content analysis (coding and categorization) was done. Three participants commonly pointed out some difficulties associated with classroom management, which were related to student's parallel talk during class time and lack of concentration. Two participants who are Japanese native speakers also mentioned their own Portuguese language ability as a difficulty. "Teaching method", "My own Japanese knowledge", "Student learning" were listed as what they care about at work. As part-time lecturers, they are aware that it will be difficult to change the course design as well as its purposes, but it may be possible to influence learners' motivation and build good relationships with them. It was also realized that they believe that the spirit of mutual assistance among them and their students is important in the classroom, and that enables them to reflect and improve their own way of teaching. In other words, while carefully considering their limits as a novice teacher (Micole, 2007, Ushikubo, 2013, 2014, 2015), like their own teaching skills, knowledge and classroom management, the participants in this study believe that building and keeping good relationships with students may beneficially influence their motivation and learning process.