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This paper reports on interviews conducted with 36 teachers involved in university preparation courses at language teaching centres in New Zealand. The interviews were designed to investigate teacher attitudes to extensive reading in higher educational contexts, and current practice in such contexts. While teachers expressed positive beliefs about the language learning benefits of extensive reading, these beliefs did not generally result in the inclusion of extensive reading in the classroom programme. This may reflect the realities of the wider educational context. If extensive reading is to be more widespread in higher educational contexts, it needs to be promoted through teacher education, new research, changes in course design, raising awareness among administrators and managers, and improved resource provision.

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The knowledge and beliefs that teachers hold are an important determiner of what happens in the classroom. Ideally teacher cognition should be informed by research and theory about effective language learning. This paper examines the beliefs related to vocabulary teaching held by a cohort of 60 Malaysian pre-service teachers engaged in a multi-year trans-national teacher education programme. It also examines how these beliefs are reflected in descriptions of imagined teaching. This examination suggests that pre-service teachers hold beliefs that coincide with those of their trainers to some extent, but that they do not give effective expression to their beliefs in descriptions of teaching. It may therefore be more appropriate to focus on developing knowledge of language teaching practices in pre-service teacher education than on beliefs.