Analyzing student teachers' academic literacy needs: A qualitative analysis of Flemish first-year teacher trainees' needs
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Tine Van Houtven is a research assistant working on two projects of the Education Development Fund of the KU Leuven Association, concerned with reading and writing in higher education. She works at Thomas More Antwerpen.
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Elke Peters is an assistant professor of English at the Department of Language and Communication and the Department of Business Studies, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Her research interests include instructed second language acquisition, vocabulary acquisition, and educational language policy.Kris Van den Branden is a professor of linguistics and teacher educator at the Faculty of Arts of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. At the same university, he is the current director of the Centre for Language and Education.
Abstract
In recent years, the student population enrolling in Flemish higher education has become increasingly diverse. Whereas teacher training institutes used to attract mainly students with a diploma of general secondary education, the proportion of students with a technical or vocational educational background has grown substantially over the past ten years. Unsurprisingly, teacher trainers indicate that first-year students start their academic career with increasingly diverging levels of academic literacy and consequently have learning needs in this domain. This study aimed to explore whether established research methods for analyzing second language (L2) learning needs can be applied to a first language (L1) learning context. Thus, the aim of this study was twofold: 1) to determine the academic literacy needs of first-year teacher trainees in Flanders and 2) to investigate the validity and reliability of a specific methodology used for analyzing language learning needs in the domain of L2 acquisition. Drawing on frameworks described by Long (2005a, 2005b) and Brown (2009), a variety of methods and sources was used to collect the data. Open interviews, a language test, a questionnaire, and focus group interviews were employed as methods; first-year students, third-year students, and lecturers participated in the study as sources. The analyses showed that the methodology for analyzing L2 needs enabled us to determine teacher trainees' L1 academic literacy needs. However, our findings also revealed that in order to obtain reliable data on language learning needs, sources and methods should not only be carefully sequenced but should be triangulated as well.
About the authors
Tine Van Houtven is a research assistant working on two projects of the Education Development Fund of the KU Leuven Association, concerned with reading and writing in higher education. She works at Thomas More Antwerpen.
Elke Peters is an assistant professor of English at the Department of Language and Communication and the Department of Business Studies, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Her research interests include instructed second language acquisition, vocabulary acquisition, and educational language policy.
Kris Van den Branden is a professor of linguistics and teacher educator at the Faculty of Arts of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. At the same university, he is the current director of the Centre for Language and Education.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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- Analyzing student teachers' academic literacy needs: A qualitative analysis of Flemish first-year teacher trainees' needs
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- Developing communicative competence in university language programmes
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- The impact of language policy issues on program development and management at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich Language Center
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Anwendungsorientierte Forschung in und für Fremdsprachenzentren: Eine neue (?) Herausforderung
- Analyzing student teachers' academic literacy needs: A qualitative analysis of Flemish first-year teacher trainees' needs
- “As you sow so shall you reap” – but what to sow? The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) applied to a Flemish business context
- Designing tailor-made academic paths for university language students
- Developing communicative competence in university language programmes
- Advanced learners of German as a foreign language in an academic context: Some didactic implications of their needs and motivations
- Learning in a language centre: A new kind of “do-it-yourself”?
- The impact of language policy issues on program development and management at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich Language Center
- Plurilingualism, multilingualism and internationalisation in the European Higher Education Area: Challenges and perspectives at a Swiss University
- The linguistic landscape of international students in English-medium Master's programmes at the University of Helsinki: Student perceptions on the use of English and plurilingualism
- Engaging L2 undergraduates in relevant project work and interaction: A role for video conferencing
- Language education at the University of Aveiro before and after Bologna: Practices and discourses
- Sprachenpolitik und ihre Umsetzung am Beispiel des Mobilitätsprogramms Erasmus Mundus
- Preserving plurilingualism: A case study of emerging language policy in a small polytechnic institute in Portugal
