Exploring Pre-Service Teacher’s Perspectives on Teaching Young Children Bilingually

Abstract

This paperdiscusses how pre-service kindergarten teachers view bilingual teaching. The research is a preliminary study that involved 240 pre-service teachers studying at a university in Jakarta. Data were collected through an online questionnaire and analyzed with descriptive statistics and factor analysis. The results depict that the majority of the participants agree on the importance of having bilingual capacity and believe that children will develop better learning ability when taught two languages since early age. However, a contradictory view is shown when more than half of the participants consider that teaching a foreign language should be done after the children acquire their mother tongue. The results showed that bilingual ability and sequence of acquisition were key variables that informed teachers' perspective on bilingualism. The discussion in this paper contributes to the conversation on the area of bilingualism and the importance of bilingual skill from the pre-service kindergarten teachers' point of view.