The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is located in the Arabian Gulf region to the north and east of Saudi Arabia and west of Oman. Its population is about 4.25 million. The rise of the oil industry since the 1950s, accompanied by wise political decisions, has dramatically changed the UAE people's traditional way of life to that of a highly modernized country. A quick look at UNICEF statistics regarding education and health gives an impression of this modernization; the youth (15-24 years) literacy rate during 2000-06 was around 98% (males) and 96% (females); the primary school enrollment ratio during that same period was 85% (males) and 82% (females); the annual number of births in 2006 was 69,000 and deaths of children under 5 was 1,000; and GNI per capita was about $23,950 (UNICEF, 2001).The UAE started formal schooling in the 1953/54 academic year with one school in Sharjah. Since then, education has been flourishing in numbers as well as in quality. Earlier, in the beginning of the 20th century, schooling was semisystematic in nature or even arbitrary. Schools were located in big cities and were managed by individuals who decided the curricula with the purpose of helping people to understand the religion and deal with pearl merchants-the business that was popular in the Gulf area.The first public kindergarten in UAE was established in 1955 in Ras Al-Khaimah. By 1974, there were 7 kindergartens; by 2004, there were 97, accommodating about 2,300 children (National Childhood Committee, 2005). As part of a centralized system, public kindergartens follow certain mandates, including that teachers should teach academics using a direct instructional approach, instruction and evaluation Abstract. The present study aimed at investigating kindergarten teachers' views of the curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Data were collected by an open-ended questionnaire, interviews, and observations. Forty-four kindergarten teachers in the United Arab Emirates responded to the questionnaire; six teachers were later interviewed. Results revealed that some teachers believe that the official curriculum is not developmentally appropriate, as it focuses more on academics rather than on child development in social, physical, emotional, and intellectual aspects. Results also revealed that the vision of developmentally appropriate practices among these kindergarten teachers has not been well-acknowledged and that their instructional and assessment practices emphasize teaching academic skills, using a direct instructional approach.

The purpose of the study was to examine student teachers' perceptions of teaching writing in kindergartens and to identify to what extent the cooperating teachers influence the student teachers' perceptions. To achieve the research aims, a 31-item questionnaire was developed by the researchers and administered to 50 student teachers and their cooperating teachers. The questionnaire was administrated to both groups as a pre-test and to student teachers as a posttest. The results of the study revealed that student teachers were more likely to be emergent literacy-oriented in their perceptions of teaching writing than they were to the reading readiness philosophy. Furthermore, the influence of the cooperating teachers was insignificant as the student teachers' perceptions of teaching writing developed earlier were more stable and difficult to alter later. In light of these findings the researchers addressed a number of suggestions and recommendations.

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