On the Role of Pre-service Language Teachers’ Beliefs on Multilingual Education in Developing Teacher Training Programs

Abstract

AbstractFor over twenty years now the role of teachers’ beliefs in teacher education designed to help pre-service and in-service teachers develop their thinking and practices has been a topic of intense debate among teacher educators and trainers (cf. Freeman and Johnson 2005; Borg 2003; Mattheoudakis 2007; Farrell and Kun 2008; Gabryś-Barker 2010; Li and Walsh 2011). According to Calderhead (1996) the main areas in which teachers have been found to hold significant beliefs are learners and learning; teaching; the subject itself; the process of learning to teach; the self and the teaching roles. The present chapter, however, refers to those beliefs that are related to multilingual didactics (Jessner 2006; Ringbom 2007). More specifically, the article discusses and promotes the need to analyse the pre-service teachers’ beliefs in the field of teaching a second foreign language (L3). Undoubtedly, the findings, which demonstrate what pre-service teachers think of L3 teaching and learning within the context of multilingual education may have practical implications for course design and evaluation in language teacher education programs—both in the area of ELT as well as in the field of teaching other foreign languages. Moreover, insights from such data could help to identify and address the gaps between pre-service teachers’ beliefs and the requirements of the language teacher training courses. Thus, the present chapter advocates in favor of exploiting pre-service teachers’ beliefs on multilinguality in the teacher training programs.KeywordsForeign LanguageLanguage LearningTeacher Education ProgramLanguage TeacherForeign Language LearningThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.