Exploring Singaporean Chinese Language Teachers’ Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge and its Relationship to the Teachers’ Pedagogical Beliefs

The notion of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) has recently emerged as a key theoretical framework that could help explain the complexity involved when teachers integrate ICT into classroom teaching. While the framework has been employed in hundreds of published studies, surveys of teachers’ TPACK for specific subject matter, especially for language teaching, has been rare. In addition, there is also a lack of studies about the relationship between teachers’ TPACK and teachers’ beliefs. This study investigates the profile of Singaporean Chinese language teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) and their pedagogical beliefs. It first validated an adapted questionnaire entitled “Technological Pedagogical Chinese Language Knowledge”. Based on the data collected from the questionnaire, the findings reveal that the teachers rated themselves as most competent in content knowledge but least competent in TPACK. The qualitative findings provide further support on the teachers’ self-rated profile. The relationship between Teachers’ TPACK and how it is related to teachers’ constructivist or traditional pedagogical beliefs are investigated through Pearson’s correlation. The findings suggest that teachers’ TPACK is more related to the teachers’ constructivist pedagogical beliefs than to the traditional beliefs. Implications of the current study in terms of Chinese language teachers’ professional development are discussed.