Student teachers' knowledge of literacy practices in school

Abstract

Current conceptions of literacy education require reading/writing teachers who have rich internal representations of the multiplicity of text types found in the school environment. This study focused on student teachers who specialize in reading and writing. The purpose of this study was to describe the representations of discipline-specific, literacy practices. Using the research methods of self-completion questionnaires and focus-group discussions, 50 reading/writing student teachers described the literacy practices of seven school disciplines: Literature, Bible, History, Geography, Chemistry, Biology and Computers. The participants' data was analyzed qualitatively and was then analyzed for its underlying structure using a hierarchical cluster analysis technique. The results show that these student teachers have a separate representation for the literacy practices of each school discipline which includes a set of specific characteristic features and an underlying structure of similarities between school disciplines in relation to these literacy practices. In addition, an affective component was identified for these groupings of literacy practices. The underlying structure of this inner world of text types involved the broad differentiation between the sciences and the humanities. The student teachers of this study had more detailed and professional knowledge of the humanities than the sciences and they also preferred the humanities. These results indicate a bias against literacy practices in the sciences.