Pre-Service Teachers' Attitudes about Writing and Learning to Teach Writing: Implications for Teacher Educators

The relationship between attitude and the practice of teaching writing among preservice teachers is an important consideration for a number of reasons. Perhaps most significantly, these students will soon be responsible for teaching writing in schools where superior writing instruction is needed. The need for improving the effectiveness of future writing teachers is underscored by a recent evaluation by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which indicated that only half of the students in grades 4, 8, and 12 in the United States are able to write adequate responses to informative, persuasive, or narrative writing tasks. The NAEP report also reveals that students generally receive little writing instruction. Furthermore, work by Lucas (1993) indicates that writing process is not as well established in the United States as advocates might have hoped. Therefore, it seems that greater efforts should be "given to the professional development of teachers who will be expected to guide students' writing." Certainly in any profession there are "certain sets of attitudes essential to the effective conduct of that profession." Since research clearly demonstrates the important relationship between teachers' attitudes about writing and their performance in the classroom, research that explores where writing attitudes originate and how they influence practice are worthy of attention. In this study, the author asks the following questions: (1) What attitudes did pre-service teachers hold regarding writing and the teaching of writing when they entered their final semester of pre-service professional education?; (2) What were the major influences on these attitudes?; and (3) What was the relationship between the participants' writing attitudes and the teaching process they actually employed during student teaching? (Contains 1 table.)