Change in Beliefs of Pre-service Teachers about Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language Throughout an Undergraduate Pre-service Teacher Training Program

Abstract

This paper reports on a study that investigated changes in the beliefs about teaching and learning English as a foreign language of three final-year undergraduate pre-service teachers throughout a nine-month pre-service training program in one of the universities in Northern Cyprus. Although a considerable amount of research has already been conducted about the development/change in pre-service teachers' beliefs, most of these studies were carried out in native contexts and in short teacher training programs and this left us with minimal insights into non-native contexts and long teacher training programs (Borg, 2006). Considering the possible contextual differences that might exist between different contexts where English is used as first or second language (Calderhead & Shorrock, 1997) and the differences between different teacher training programs which vary in length, it is believed that exploring EFL pre-service teachers' beliefs and the development/change in their beliefs' during their teacher training over a longer period of time would contribute to our understanding of what actually happens in EFL teacher training programs. Such exploration is expected to reveal what sort of beliefs about learning and teaching EFL pre-service teachers have when they start teacher training programs and how their beliefs could develop/change throughout their training. Unlike the quantitative approaches adopted in the majority of the studies which investigated the similar phenomenon, qualitative approach was adopted to explore pre-service teachers' belief development/change with the intention of revealing a more holistic picture of their belief structures. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews at three-month intervals and through contemporaneous diary writing activity throughout the training program. Changes in all three pre-service teachers' beliefs were evidenced from the beginning to the end of the training programme. The theoretical and pedagogical implications of the study for the development of future teacher training programs are discussed.