NOVICE ENGLISH TEACHER EXPERIENCES ON TEACHING SPEAKING USING PESANTREN GONTOR ENGLISH TEXTBOOK: NARRATIVE STUDY

Teachers have crucial role in education. They played a role in delivering material, educating, guiding, directing, training, and evaluating students so that they can be called professional teachers. There were many challenges and experiences before they were called professional teachers. This research aimed to find out the challenges and experiences of novice teachers in teaching English, so that they could provide an overview for most people who started their careers as teachers, especially for teachers in Islamic boarding schools. This research implemented a narrative inquiry method, that was retold the author's personal experience. Researchers used three research instruments, namely observation to find out the teaching process (present), interviews where there were two sessions, the first to cross-check data from observations, and the second to find out teaching experience (past), experience during teaching, and challenges (present), and hopes and career plans (future), as well as reflective journals written by participants about their experiences as novice teachers. Three novice English teachers at the same boarding school were involved as research participants. They taught for about one to two years and only had teaching experience during teaching practice ('amaliyatut tadris). The results of this research indicated that the teaching practice of novice English teachers was still not optimal because they faced various challenges, both from internal factors (lack of self-confidence, lack of ability to adapt to the environment, unstable emotions, not meeting learning targets, not being able to manage time, and difficulty to motivate students to be confident in speaking) and external factors (many students lack discipline, students ask questions outside of the material, and the lack of technological media in learning). In the future, they want to continue to be hone their skills and improve their teaching. They also hope that they can get more guidance from their cleric in the form of special teaching training and feedback from the teaching that has been done.