The impact of second language teacher education on the development of pre-service teachers’ pedagogical beliefs

The current study explores the impact of second language teacher education (SLTE) on the development of the pedagogic beliefs held by fifty student-teachers enrolled in a public university in central Mexico. Specifically, the research investigates the extent to which conceptions of effective teaching changed, or didn’t, over the course of a four-year BA. Repertory grid interviews were used as the primary method of data collection. The repertory grid technique is the best known of several data solicitation instruments associated with the field of personal construct psychology. Data was subjected to both qualitative and quantitative inspection, including an assessment of cognitive complexity and principal component analyses. Results suggest that the participants who were SLTE students did not appear to significantly change their pedagogic beliefs over the course of the educational intervention. However, graduates of the SLTE program were found to hold significantly different kinds of pedagogical beliefs than the participants still enrolled in the BA, particularly in terms of their beliefs about reflection, student autonomy, and student-centeredness. This suggests that with time, internalized learnings from the program may have an opportunity to come to the fore and positively impact teacher practice.