A mixed-methods approach to analysing interdependencies and predictors of pre-service teachers’ beliefs about multilingualism

Abstract

This paper presents findings from a pre–post study on pre-service teachers’ beliefs about multilingualism and language use. A full cohort of pre-service middle school teachers in Germany (n = 259) was surveyed before and after completing a compulsory module on multilingualism using a validated instrument that captures participants’ beliefs about (a) multilingual language use in the home, (b) multilingual language use in the classroom, and (c) teacher responsibility for language support in teaching and learning. While mean average scores of the respondents’ beliefs are not as high as in comparable studies, the results show a significant increase between the pre- and post-test. Multivariate statistics are employed to explore different dimensions of beliefs improvement as well as predictors of positive beliefs. With a critical view about the Likert-scale type items, the quantitative dataset was expanded by structured interviews with five participants. The results of qualitative content analyses of these interviews make it possible to show different facets of the survey’s constructs of beliefs as well as individual backgrounds making them explainable, and thus help to gain a more nuanced picture of the respondents’ beliefs.

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