Abstract:
Different attitudes towards the use of English as
the MoI within a multilingual environment exist.
These attitudes can affect pre-service teachers’
future classroom practices and learners’
performance. In this regard, ethnocentrism, an
attitudinal indicator, should be considered when
investigating pre-service teachers’ attitudes
towards language-in-education issues.
Ethnocentrism, the tendency of an individual
to identify strongly with their own ethnicity
and reject others', draws on the social identity
theory, owing to its focus on in-group-out-group
distinctions, racism and stereotyping. This
article’s primary purpose was to determine if preservice
teachers’ attitudes toward language-ineducation
issues are related to their degree of
ethnocentrism. An embedded mixed- methods
research design and a post-positivist paradigm
was used. The research site was a private
higher education institution with a mono-ethnic
student population. A questionnaire using the
Language Attitudes of Teachers Scale and
the Generalised Ethnocentrism Scale served
as the data collection instrument to measure
1 164 pre-service teachers' attitudes towards
language-in-education issues and their
degree of ethnocentrism. The data showed a
statistically significant relationship between
the pre-service teachers' attitudes and their
degree of ethnocentrism and revealed potential
indicators of lower and higher degrees of
ethnocentrism. This study recommends
that teacher education programmes create
awareness of the relationship between attitudes
and ethnocentrism to prepare pre-service
teachers for multilingual and multicultural
classrooms.
