Use of diaries to investigate and track pre-service teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning English as a foreign language throughout a pre-service training program

Although teacher beliefs have been widely debated and studied in the area of language teacher education, there has been less discussion of the methodologies employed to explore this area. The literature indicates that as beliefs usually remain unstated, emotional and hidden, they should be carefully and indirectly studied (Pajares, 1992). Consequently, various data collection instruments have been proposed. While interviews, questionnaires and classroom observations have been used in a number of studies (e.g. Cabaroglu, 1998; Mattheoudakis, 2006), less is known about diaries in terms of how successful they are in eliciting beliefs and if they are able to obtain relevant and valid data. The proposed study examined the use of diaries to investigate and track student teachers’ beliefs (whether they change or not) about teaching and learning English as a foreign language throughout a nine-month pre-service training program in a university in Northern Cyprus. Three pre-service teachers were given several short booklets to keep and return at regular intervals throughout their training. The findings indicate that diaries are able to reveal what sort of beliefs pre-service teachers held when they started their training. Moreover, they suggest that the entries recorded constitute short immediate stories that could be helpful in linking, understanding and tracking what pre-service teachers experienced during their training and how their beliefs and feelings were affected as a result of those experiences. Furthermore, comparing and analyzing each diary entry provided useful insights into the changes and the reasons that led to changes in preservice teachers’ beliefs. The main problems highlighted are the recording of irrelevant information by the participants and issues relating to how to interpret some of the diary data. Suggestions are made regarding how to overcome such difficulties. The methodological implications of the study for further research are discussed.