The influence of personal history on preservice Malay, Tamil and Chinese teacher thinking

Abstract

Explorations of preservice teacher thinking in the West illustrate the considerable influence that personal history can exert on the developing cognition of teachers. This paper extends the discussion by providing a cross-cultural perspective of Asian preservice teacher constructs of the ideal language teacher. Participants in this study were all preservice language teachers training to be specialist Malay, Tamil, Chinese or English language teachers in Singapore. Data was collected through the use of written biography, metaphor and personal construct interviews. Analysis of data reveals that preservice language teachers enter formal teacher education with well developed constructs or views of the ideal language teacher and related approaches to language learning.