PSTs Beliefs on Multilingualism in Türkiye

Recent migration movements have increased linguistic diversity in classrooms across Türkiye and made multilingual classrooms more prominent nationwide. Regardless of whether teachers possess the necessary knowledge and skills for such environments, their beliefs are critically important. As the first study of its kind in Türkiye, this survey aims to understand pre-service teachers' (PSTs) views on multilingualism. It was conducted with 430 PSTs from different universities, using three scales: epistemological beliefs about using the mother tongue at home, language support in subject classes, and general beliefs about multilingualism in classrooms. The results show that PSTs generally hold positive attitudes towards multilingualism, with factors like gender, teaching subject, education on teaching Turkish as an additional language, communicative proficiency in another language, and experience of studying in multilingual classrooms during pre-university years influencing these attitudes. The pedagogical knowledge provided by the teacher training system negatively affects PSTs’ attitudes towards multilingualism. Based on these findings, it is recommended that the Turkish teacher training system be re-evaluated to better foster PSTs’ affective and emotional competencies towards multilingualism.