Pre-service teacher cognition and practices in Malaysian secondary school teacher education: How trainee ESL teachers experiment with multiliteracies pedagogy

Abstract

This thesis investigates pre-service teachers’ cognition and practices upon the introduction of a new teaching pedagogy during a short, focused training held in their teacher education programme. Additionally, it looks at the relationship between their cognition and practices embracing the new teaching approach. Even though there has been an increased interest in the study of teachers’ cognition research over the decades, studies on the cognition of language teachers on the uptake of a new teaching pedagogy mainly focused on in-service teachers. Studies on the cognition of pre-service teachers upon the uptake of an innovative practices remain limited, particularly research into teachers with little or no experiential background in teaching and in the context of a short-focused training.In light of the rapid expansion of technology and the impact of globalization, the Malaysian education system, like many other countries, was aware of the importance of equipping its schoolchildren with the necessary skills, such as improving (English) language skills and digital literacy, to become global citizens of the 21st century. Consequently, Malaysia has joined the global education policy phenomena of introducing curricular innovations and reforms aligned with developing 21st century learning. The implementation of such innovation was, however, more problematic. Most secondary ESL classrooms were struggling to adopt different ways of teaching and learning as well as instruction in digital skills. Malaysian scholars have suggested that multiliteracies pedagogy might be helpful to the national agenda, improving English teaching and learning in Malaysian schools. While there has been a vast amount of research on this approach from various perspectives, there has been little research done on pre-service teacher cognition and multiliteracies pedagogy.Therefore, this study aims to explore pre-service teacher cognition on multiliteracies pedagogy introduced in a short, focused training held in their teacher education programme; to investigate their implementation of the pedagogy in real classrooms during their teaching practicum; and toexamine the relationship between their cognition and practices with respect to multiliteracies pedagogy. The mental lives and instructional practices of six pre-service teachers were captured through a qualitative case study. The six pre-service teachers were from a four-year teacher education programme, Teaching of English as a Second Language (TESL) course for secondary education, at International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM). The data were gathered from semi-structured interviews, classroom observation and document analysis. The outcome provides interesting insights into the evolving cognition and practices of the six pre-service teachers, factors that encourage the adoption of the pedagogy, and impediments that limited their practices in implementing the pedagogy and putting the theory into practice. This study also sheds light on the relationship between their cognition and actual practices in relation to multiliteracies pedagogy.The findings suggest that the pre-service teachers had developing awareness on the principles underlying the characteristics of multiliteracies pedagogy but their level of understanding varied. They were aware of the characteristics of multiliteracies pedagogy elements such as the knowledge processes, multimodality, learner diversity as well as the roles of teachers and students in a multiliteracies classroom. Most of their conceptualizations/ understandings were congruent with the theory of multiliteracies pedagogy presented in the workshop but in some cases, inconsistencies were also evident. Some teachers were able to successfully implement multiliteracies pedagogy in their instructional practices. This is evident in their use of various knowledge processes, multimodal representations, diversity, and agency even though their interviews revealed only a partial awareness of some of the main tenets of multiliteracies pedagogy. Their instructional practices mirrored to a certain extent the practices of multiliteracies pedagogy even though the degree of application varied. The findings also reveal that the relationship between the pre-service teacher cognition and practices are complex, dynamic and interdependent. It was found that contextual and affective factors are key influences in the translation of cognition into practices. Meanwhile, the affective factors appear to be crucial in mediating the extent to which the pre-service teachers practiced multiliteracies pedagogy.This study hopes to broaden the understanding of the complexity of teacher cognition upon the introduction of new ideas and the appropriacy of short, focused pre-service teacher education course to support cognitive development of teachers. The potential impacts of the study include understanding the factors that mediate the uptake of the innovative practices which confirmed and supported those of previous studies.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Haziqah Zulaikha Aris: orcid.org/0000-0002-8335-1556

ORCID for Alison Porter: orcid.org/0000-0002-8462-1909

ORCID for Glyn Hicks: orcid.org/0000-0003-4126-8655

ORCID for Adriana Patino: orcid.org/0000-0003-1950-3954

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