Pre-service Teacher Cognition and Vocabulary Teaching

The knowledge and beliefs that teachers hold are an important determiner of what happens in the classroom. Ideally teacher cognition should be informed by research and theory about effective language learning. This paper examines the beliefs related to vocabulary teaching held by a cohort of 60 Malaysian pre-service teachers engaged in a multi-year trans-national teacher education programme. It also examines how these beliefs are reflected in descriptions of imagined teaching. This examination suggests that pre-service teachers hold beliefs that coincide with those of their trainers to some extent, but that they do not give effective expression to their beliefs in descriptions of teaching. It may therefore be more appropriate to focus on developing knowledge of language teaching practices in pre-service teacher education than on beliefs.