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Preservice teachers can no longer be prepared using conventional teaching approaches as these are inadequate to equip them with the necessary knowledge and skills they require to perform the tasks of teaching effectively. Teacher educators need to use new pedagogies, and narrative pedagogy is seen as a teaching method which can better prepare preservice teachers for the challenging classrooms of today. My study explored nine preservice teachers' experiences after the enactment of a narrative pedagogical approach in one of their courses within their teacher education program. I used Ricoeur's framework of the prefigured and configured arena of education to analyse the rich interview and reflective data which emerged. Three themes for the prefigured arena emerged: (a) feeling the sense of responsibility, (b) feeling anxious, and (c) feeling the lack of experience and confidence. Similarly, three themes were found for the configured arena: (a) learning through emotions, (b) learning through insights, and (c) learning through discussion. The preservice teachers have interpreted and discussed "lived" stories and this has shifted the way they think about teaching. The results do offer teacher educators and educational stakeholders a stepping-stone to further pedagogical insight into using narrative pedagogy in teacher education.

I use phenomenography, which is an interpretive research approach, to seek and to discover what beginning teachers in Malaysia conceive and understand as competence in relation to what they do everyday as teachers. Phenomenographic approach is used because of its potential to capture variation of understanding, or way of constituting, the conceptions of competency. The outcomes of this study, therefore, are: (a ) Categories of description which capture the critical dimensions of how beginning teachers in Malaysia understand the conceptions of competency, and, (b ) An outcome space that describes the relationships between the categories. The results show that beginning teachers' conceptions of competence fall into five qualitatively different categories: (a ) Classroom and Behaviour Management, (b ) Knowing Subject Matter, (c) Understanding Students; (d ) Reaching out for Assistance and Support, and (e ) Possessing Values of Professionalism. The relationships between these categories are represented diagrammatically as the outcome space. The empirical data through phenomenography has provided a platform for teachers and teacher educators to ask: (a) " What are the implications, for beginning teachers, of their differing ways of understanding the conceptions of competency" (b) " How can teaching institutions better prepare pre - service teachers for their early years of teaching," and, (c) "How can appraisers (e.g., Principals, Head Teachers, Course Coordinators) use the outcomes to better plan any evaluations of competency?" I discuss each question in the article.

This study investigated Malaysian preschool teachers' self-efficacy and attitudes toward the use of the English language as a medium of instruction (EMI) and proposed a model of how different variables were related to their use of English in the classrooms. In order to obtain a broad picture of the nature and scope of preschool teachers' use of EMI, a survey study was undertaken. The research instrument was a questionnaire that was distributed to randomly-selected preschool teachers throughout Malaysia. The process of modeling was based on the empirical data and a theoretical model that was constructed on the basis of the two theoretical aspects, that is self-efficacy and attitudes-behavior relation. The theoretical model served as a bridge between the abstractions from theory and the development of the model. The model suggested that strong self-efficacy influenced preschool teachers' use of English to teach. In addition, the model also indicated that those preschool teachers with positive attitudes also felt self-efficacious in using English to teach and negative attitudes had the opposite effect. Those preschool teachers who had a positive attitude that teaching using English would be useful for the children perceived that they had greater ability toward handling classroom management issues. In addition, they believed too, that they were confident to use appropriate assessment tasks in the classroom when English was used as the medium of instruction. It would appear that self-efficacy and attitudes were mutually related to preschool teachers' use of English to teach.