Pre-service teachers' knowledge of language and literacy concepts: The skeleton in Canada's closet?

The overall goal of this study was to examine pre-service teachers' knowledge of language and literacy concepts across different provinces in Canada. Eight hundred and eighty-three pre-service teachers completed a survey measuring their knowledge of three literacy components (phonological awareness, phonics and morphology). Results showed first that they had an overall score of 65% in phonological awareness, 62% in phonics and 37% in morphology. Second, they did significantly better in questions of implicit knowledge than explicit knowledge. Finally, their ratings of perceived ability in teaching the aforementioned concepts correlated significantly (rs ranged from .24 to .30) with their respective knowledge score. Taken together, these results suggest that many Canadian pre-service teachers have a rather limited understanding of the basic language and literacy concepts, particularly in the area of morphology. Given that these scores are not much different than those reported in the literature 10 years ago, we recommend that more substantive measures are put in place to bring that required knowledge to our pre-service teachers.