Original Research
“All Learners will Enjoy this!” The (Limited) Integration of Individual Differences in Primary EFL Teachers’ Task Planning
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The present study investigates how pre-service and in-service primary EFL teachers in Germany consider individual differences (IDs) when making long- and short-term planning decisions. Participants were presented with two vignettes designed to initiate prospective reflection processes typical of (professional) planning. The resulting written reflections were analyzed alongside qualitative content analysis with a focus on the nature and degree of learner referencing. Results indicate that learner references were predominantly generic, while differentiated references occurred less frequently. When differentiation was present, it was primarily performance-based. Although references to ID dimensions appeared comparatively rarely and unsystematically, they addressed a broad variety of ID dimensions. The study discusses the implications of these findings for teacher education, arguing for more structured and supported opportunities to practice knowledge-based, heterogeneity-sensitive prospective reflection.
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Keywords
Primary School Teachers; Individual Differences; Task Planning; Lesson Planning; Prospective Reflection
Author(s) Information
Publisher’s Note
The claims, arguments, and counter-arguments made in this article are exclusively those of the contributing authors. Hence, they do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of the authors’ affiliated institutions, or EUROKD as the publisher, the editors and the reviewers of the article.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the editors and reviewers for their constructive feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.
Funding
I received no fund for this research project.
CRediT Authorship Contribution Statement
Alessa Haase: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal Analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data Curation, Writing - Original Draft, Writing - Review & Editing, Project Administration
Generative AI Use Disclosure Statement
During the preparation of this work, the author used Anthropic’s Claude (Claude Opus 4.8) to assist with language editing, phrasing and the structuring of academic prose. All AI-generated content was critically reviewed, verified, revised, and edited by the author, who takes full responsibility for the accuracy of the final manuscript.
Ethics Declarations
World Medical Association (WMA) Declaration of Helsinki–Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Participants
The researcher observed the code of ethics of WMA in the participants recuruiment and data collection procedure.
Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare
Data Availability
All data used for this article are stored on secure servers in compliance with German data protection regulations and can only be made available by the corresponding author upon reasonable request and in accordance with applicable data protection requirements.