Building upon Wanlin and Crahay (2015), this research aims at identifying the conceptions of pre-service teachers on transmissive, socioconstructivist and explicit approaches. While Wanlin and Crahay (2015) designed a questionnaire measuring the extent to which pre-service teachers embraced the transmissive and/or socioconstructivist approach, we hypothesize that explicit teaching, whereas often confused with a caricatured “transmissive” approach, is a distinct dimension of the model that needs to be apprehended by specific items and that may be embraced by some pre-service teachers. We designed a questionnaire including these new items on explicit teaching in addition to Wanlin and Crahay’s items and administered it to 563 pre-service primary and secondary teachers in 6 training institutions in French-speaking Belgium. Our results do not support our starting hypothesis of the existence of an “explicit approach” dimension in our respondents. Further focusing on “transmissive” and socioconstructivist conceptions in our respondents, our analyses show that the socioconstructivist conception is widely shared but do not systematically oppose a “transmissive” conception. We found evidence of effects related to institution, year of study and type of training on these conceptions. Concerning year of study and type of training, third-year students and future primary teachers are more socioconstructivist and less “transmissive” than the first-year students and future secondary teachers. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published