ABSTRACT

This study examines the effectiveness of a specially designed intervention in changing preservice teacher beliefs about the education of linguistically diverse students. The experiment involved a semester-long online letter exchange with English learner (EL) pen pal partners from two public schools. The research questions included: What effect did participation in an E-Pal exchange program have on content-area preservice K–12 teachers’ beliefs about (a) benefits of the inclusion of ELs in mainstream classrooms; who should be responsible for ELs’ (b) academic achievement and (c) language development; and (d) benefits of culturally responsive pedagogy for ELs’ education? Participants included 74 preservice teachers in experimental (n = 35) and control (n = 39) groups. Survey data were submitted to several repeated-measure factorial ANOVA tests. Results suggested that the experiment had a transformative effect on all four measures pertaining to teachers’ beliefs about ELs’ education. In addition, item-based post hoc analyses revealed some specific items that contributed to differences between participants’ pre-and posttest gain scores more saliently.

摘要

本研究考察了特殊设计的干预措施在改变职前教师对语言多样化学生的教育观念方面的有效性。实验涉及与来自两所公立学校的英语学习者（EL）笔友的伙伴进行的为期一个学期的在线信件交流。研究问题包括：参与E-Pal交换计划对内容区域职前K-12教师的信念有何影响：（a）将EL纳入主流教室的好处；谁应该负责EL（b）的学术成就和（c）语言发展；（d）具有文化响应性的教学法对EL教育的益处？参加人员包括74名职前教师，分别从事实验（n = 35）和对照（n= 39）组。调查数据已提交给多个重复测量的阶乘方差分析测试。结果表明，该实验对与教师对EL的教育观念有关的所有四个措施都具有变革性的作用。此外，基于项目的事后分析揭示了一些特定的项目，这些项目更显着地导致了参与者的测验前和测验后增益得分之间的差异。