Investigating Non-English Pre-Service Teachers’ Mindsets in Learning English as a Foreign Language

Abstract

The notion of mindset in psychology has been adopted in diverse fields including education. However, there has been limited study that measured mindset in English language teaching area. This study was aimed at investigating nonEnglish major pre-service teachers’ mindset in learning English as a foreign language. An English Language Mindset Survey (ELMS) was used to collect the data. It consisted of six factors with 5 Likert scale responses. It has very good reliability with the Cronbach’s Alpha 0.95. The ELMS was distributed to more than 600 non-English major preservice teachers in two teacher education programs in Palembang, Indonesia and Khartoum, Sudan. The results show that growth mindset of non-English major pre-service teachers from a teacher education program in Palembang, Indonesia is high when their classmates succeed in the English class (M=4.24) and from a teacher education program in Khartoum, Sudan is high when they felt challenged in learning English (M=4.13). The growth mindset of pre-service teachers from both teacher education programs is low when they met obstacles in terms of meeting difficulty in learning English (M=2.40 and 2.06 respectively). Among factors of ELMS, the students are neutral-minded in other factors.