Introduction Teaching practice (TP) is an essential component of the English course at Teachers’ colleges in China, in which new recruits are provided with a platform to put what they learn in the training programme into practice. The radical change from learner to teacher usually means a difficult beginning for trainees, although they have first-hand experience of learning English as a foreign language. Facing a textbook, of which each lesson consists of several components: new words, sentence patterns, text, grammar, and exercises, they are required to work out lesson plans which will ensure the achievement of the teaching objectives.