The primary school teachers’ professionalism for reading instruction
This article investigates the content knowledge and beliefs of primary school teachers about reading instruction from the Shulman’s ‘pedagogical content knowledge’ view, and explores the realities of reading instruction in the classroom. For the purpose, questionnaires were used. The questions were consisted of three areas: items for in-class reading instruction, teacher’s belief on reading, and teacher’s content knowledge about reading. The data revealed that the primary school teachers have insufficient content knowledge for reading instruction, particularly in word analysis skills such as phonemic awareness, letter sound relationships, word frequency, and other topics related to reading. However, teachers’beliefs were different from their knowledge. Whereas their content knowledge about phonics, reading aloud, or story-based reading method is lower, they believe that those skills are effective for reading. It was also found that the realities of reading classroom were different from teachers’ beliefs. Although teachers believe that rich print environment facilitates the learners’ reading development, the print environments were little provided and they did not refer to print for their teaching. The result of analysis suggests that teacher training which focuses on reading instruction needs to be emphasized for effective reading instruction.