A preliminary study of pre-service teachers as readers in Singapore: Prolific, functional or detached

This paper describes a research study completed in Singapore with students enrolled in an education degree program. The researchers were interested in the reading habits of Singaporean students who will become teachers of English in the Singapore government teaching service. Of interest is the data collection method which involved the development of characters of young adult readers of English in Singapore following work by Marshall (2000). Students selected the character most similar to themselves from three different descriptive characters of readers. They then highlighted salient features in the character that led them to select this character and also highlighted those features that were not similar to them. This innovative approach to data collection was used to reveal the characteristics of student readers and then consider the resultant English teachers that these readers might become. Possible changes to teacher training programs are discussed.