The Reflective Assignment: Unlocking Pre-Service English Teachers' Beliefs On Grammar Teaching

Recently, there has been a call for teacher education programs to acknowledge student teachers' prior knowledge and personal understandings as having an influential role in developing them as teachers. This is important because in many countries around the world, the method of teaching English has changed over the years from an emphasis on overt grammar instruction in the past to a more communicative approach in recent times. However, many pre-service teachers have been educated in English by traditional methods of drill and memorization of grammar rules. So there can be a mismatch between what the students have learned in the past and what they are presented in the teacher education program. An important question then arises as to how these prior experiences, often tacit, can be made more conscious and integrated into the curriculum. This paper shows how pre-service teachers' beliefs in Singapore were unlocked by the use of a three-part reflective assignment. The paper starts with a brief discussion of teachers' beliefs. Next, the study is outlined, including the course, the assignment and the student teachers' past experiences. Finally, the student teachers' reflections of their actual teaching experiences are outlined and discussed.