Abstract:

The literature indicates that teachers' beliefs associated with writing ability have an impact on the written product (White & Bruning, 2005). In other words, low performance in writing responds to the fact that teachers' beliefs would exert predictive power over the learning process and outcome. It is also argued that the reinforcement of beliefs in teachers belonging to disciplinary or scientific learning communities, has a perpetuating effect on these (Hernández & Rodríguez, 2018). This phenomenon becomes relevant in Chile since the Standards for Initial Teacher Training (2016) define writing as a basic professional skill, establishing that graduates of programs in disciplines such as Chemistry and Biology must understand the different ways of writing in disciplines and at the same time, must have the ability to communicate effectively, coherently and correctly in various professional contexts.

This paper presents the partial results of a project focused on preservice teachers’ beliefs on disciplinary academic writing, which proposes a mixed exploratory methodology. This study considers academic literacy from a sociocultural approach mediated by a set of social and cultural practices with discursive purposes (Gee, 2004), which suggests learning to write for interlocutory purposes and genres typical of scientific disciplines (Carlino, 2005, 2013 ).

For this purpose, this study seeks to identify the beliefs regarding the disciplinary academic writing of 91 second and fourth year students of the Chemistry and Biology teaching program in a public university in Chile. For this, an adapted and validated questionnaire by White & Bruning (2005) composed of 31 items and a focus group (Krueger & Anne, 2014) was applied. Data analysis was performed using Atlas Ti software and SPSS v24. The preliminary results show similar behaviors between the two groups of pre-service teachers in relation to the two types of beliefs analyzed, with a slight predominance of transactional beliefs (43.96% in second-year students and 43.52% in fourth-year students) over transmitional beliefs. In other words, the two groups visualize the learning purpose of the writing, in addition they recognize that writing demands the development of a variety of skills and competences. While 34.12% of second-year students and 33.98% of fourth-year students declare transmission beliefs, they portrait writing just as a way to transmit information, depriving it of an affective and cognitive value. Although pre-service teachers recognize writing as a potential epistemic tool mediating learning, especially in the didactic courses of the training program, they consider that the type of basic writing activities required by disciplinary courses do not promote the textual construction, therefore, writing is seen as a complex task by them.

An interesting finding in this study is the similarity in the beliefs regarding writing of preservice teachers who are in two different stages of the formative trajectory. It would have been expected that the students completing their fourth year of training as teachers, who have been exposed to a strong instruction on didactis, would have held different beliefs from those preservice teachers who are at the beginning of the training program and have mainly been exposed to disciplinary training courses. This finding supports previous research that highlights the power and tenacity of teachers’ beliefs and attitudes (Schuck, 1997).

Keywords:

Disciplinary literacy, initial teacher education, pre-service teachers’ beliefs, higher education, scientific languages.