"It’s about the whole sort of picture": complexity, conformity and confusion in student teachers’ understanding of learning to read

How we learn to read has been much debated, nationally and internationally. The aim of this study was to explore primary student teachers’ understanding of reading, the effect of sociocultural beliefs and the relationship between student teachers’ identity and their approaches to the learning and teaching of reading. Whilst there are many studies that explore Initial Teacher Education there appears to be little research exploring the effects of sociocultural beliefs on student teachers’ understanding of reading. This study was conducted within interpretivist paradigms, drawing upon a qualitative methodological approach to data collection and was influenced by the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis approach. The participants were five undergraduate student teachers enrolled on a three-year Initial Teacher Education programme at one Higher Education institution in the south-east of England. The analysis of data revealed that multiple factors influenced the student teachers’ understanding of reading, including intrinsic, extrinsic and sociocultural aspects, resulting in much complexity. Key findings of the research suggest that there is some disparity between the student teachers’ beliefs about how we learn to read and the teaching of reading in the classroom, which results in some confusion. However, student teachers also make shifts in their identity as they adapt to the situation they are in and as they conform to prevailing discourses and respond to issues relating to power, resulting in them being able to balance different approaches. The data also revealed that there was a gap in the student teachers’ knowledge and understanding relating to the social, historical, political and economic contexts of some pupil’s families. The implications for teacher educators include addressing issues such as negative assumptions about some of the reading practices of families in the schools’ communities.