Student ―Resistance‖ to Reflection: Pre-service Teacher Training at the Mostar University, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Reflection is seen as an important contributor to teacher development, but many students offer resistance when asked to become reflective. Adopting the principled framework of Exploratory Practice, we investigated the student reaction when being asked to reflect on their own learning and teaching in the fourth and fifth year introductory foreign language acquisition and teaching methods courses at the Mostar University, (B-H). Some students showed resistance to keeping reflective journal and to examining their beliefs. This practitioner research is a contribution to current discussions on how to encourage students to become productively reflective. It is an attempt to help our understanding of reflection and its role in the professional lives of (E)FL teachers. It also suggests that the perceived resistance to reflection may involve personal and sociocultural issues