scholarly journals Il profilo dell’insegnante di lingue nell’era del CLIL

Author(s):  
Bruna Di Sabato ◽  
Letizia Cinganotto ◽  
Daniela Cuccurullo

The implementation of Content and Language Integrated Learning strategies in the Italian school is consistent with the current European trend in research and educational policy. At the same time, however, these strategies highlight a number of peculiar features, amongst which the outstanding investment in training devoted to in-staff secondary school content teachers. Such training aims to enable teachers to acquire the necessary linguistic and methodological competence by combining their content discipline and the vehicular language without any recourse to foreign language teacher collaboration and/or assistance. Only lately has the role of both foreign and Italian language teachers in CLIL environments been is reconsidered by the Italian stakeholders and a series of corrective measures have been adopted. To ensure that such positive actions result in a positive outcome, the first priority is to grant the Italian foreign language teacher a profile tailored upon those highlighted by EU research and initiatives among top priorities. In 2014 Letizia Cinganotto e Daniela Cuccurullo set up the online Techno-CLIL course, followed by two further editions in 2016 and 2017: the 5,000 participants possess different nationalities, therefore providing a unique opportunity to investigate the actual teaching of foreign languages in content and language integrated pedagogy and the foreign language teacher profile at an international level. After a brief introduction to CLIL in both national and European contexts, and a presentation of the Techno-CLIL learning design, the authors will illustrate the research procedure and the initial data gathered through a survey involving this international community of language teachers and trainers with the aim of shedding new light on the language teacher profile in the CLIL era.

Author(s):  
Marianna Levrints

The unprecedented growth in the quantity, as well as quality of publications on language teacher education supported by the domain’s increasing experiential background opens up new avenues for enhancing the effectiveness of foreign language teacher education in Ukraine. Hence, the present paper aims at analyzing and singling out recurrent research themes, defining the mainstream approaches of the field of language teacher education, which constitute the emerging theoretical foundations of the field’s knowledge base. The review of the state-of-the-art publications has enabled the specification of the following research areas, pertinent to foreign language teacher education: language teacher cognition, the knowledge base of language teachers, language teacher identity, reflection, language teacher research and action research, language teacher professionalism, the role of teacher education, effectiveness of teaching, expertise, competence, teacher development and some others. The analysis of research suggests overall proliferation of the number of studies on the problem of language teacher education during the past 30˗40 years. Nevertheless, the comparison of the volume of studies highlighting general aspects of teacher education to those specifically related to foreign/second language teacher education reveals the quantitative advantage of the former. More efforts are needed at elaborating language teacher focused issues which stem from the nature of foreign language as a discipline, the socio-cultural role of language teachers and the role of foreign language in particular. Further limitations of the field-related research base, include: 1) a rather small proportion of empirical studies, necessary to provide informed answers for important questions of language teacher education; 2) the majority of available empirical studies are small-scale and contextually limited, which excludes the possibility of generalizations; 3) the field’s overall reliance on traditions, intuition and practical experience, with little regard for theoretical foundations; 4) paucity of research that present systematic complex generalizations of the field’s knowledge base;


Author(s):  
Jiahang Li

This chapter will focus on examining how instructors who are preparing foreign language teachers, both pre-service and in-service, integrate social media in their teaching practices to gain more insights on what beliefs these instructors hold and what differences and similarities between their beliefs and actual teaching practices about social media integration in foreign language teacher education. The chapter will first provide a literature review about the general beliefs that instructors held on the integration of social media and foreign language teacher education. Next, promising examples of the integration of social media in foreign language teacher education will be provided. Last but not least, affordances and challenges of the integration of social media and foreign language teacher education will be discussed, followed by implications and future directions.


ReCALL ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
LIES SERCU ◽  
ELKE PETERS

The paper presents the results of a comparative investigation of course developers’ and teacher trainees’ views regarding the usefulness and effectiveness of a multimedia self-tuition course designed to introduce foreign language teacher trainees to tools and methods for organising computer-assisted language learning. The paper first provides a brief description of the home-study course itself. It describes the course’s main components, its content as well as the learning and evaluation tasks the course provides in support of the learning process. Next, the paper reports on the way in which the evaluation project investigating teacher trainees’ and course developers’ views regarding the effectiveness of the course was set up. The project’s design is presented, and the way in which various procedures of data collection (written evaluations and individual interviews) were triangulated is commented on. In the third section we present the investigation’s main findings. The section focuses on points of agreement and disagreement between developers’ and trainees’ views regarding the usefulness and effectiveness of the course. Finally, we describe the changes brought about by the evaluation project, and reflect on the necessity to take account of future users’ views and requirements in the design and development process if the training of foreign language teachers is to benefit from web-based delivery.


2018 ◽  
pp. 279-295
Author(s):  
Jiahang Li

This chapter will focus on examining how instructors who are preparing foreign language teachers, both pre-service and in-service, integrate social media in their teaching practices to gain more insights on what beliefs these instructors hold and what differences and similarities between their beliefs and actual teaching practices about social media integration in foreign language teacher education. The chapter will first provide a literature review about the general beliefs that instructors held on the integration of social media and foreign language teacher education. Next, promising examples of the integration of social media in foreign language teacher education will be provided. Last but not least, affordances and challenges of the integration of social media and foreign language teacher education will be discussed, followed by implications and future directions.


Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 455-457
Author(s):  
Y.L MARREDDY

Y.L MARREDDY English is recognized as a universal language. Learning English is inevitable in this present global scenario. It also acts like a link language. Especially, English literature enables learners to develop critical thinking skills, helps to discover and enlighten themselves. It is quite challenging task to teachers to teach literature for studentsin non native English countries like India. The role of the language teachers becomes predominant and the methods of teaching literature according to the students’ level of understanding also play a significant role because studying literature assists students’ tohave real time experiences, passion for language acquisition and think innovatively. In this context, it is necessary for teachers to distinct between teaching literature for special purposes or it is used as a resource language for teaching this foreign language. This paper throws light on the importance of teaching literature, several approaches and methods of teaching literature at graduate level. Literature connects the cultures across the world, throws challenges to solve and even to heal some cultures. It really provides an individual space for learners to express themselves and improve competence levels among them. It allows learners to share their participation in the experience of others, strengthens to shape, alter their attitude and meet their expectations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Swanson ◽  
Robin Huff

Foreign language teachers are in critical need in many parts of rural America. Using Bandura's conceptual framework of self-efficacy teaching languages as a theoretical lens, the researchers created a scale to measure foreign language teacher efficacy and administered alongside a well-known efficacy survey to in-service rural teachers (N = 167) in Georgia. Data analysis indicates that the new instrument is psychometrically sound and there are two dimensions to language teacher efficacy: Content Knowledge and Facilitating Instruction. Positive correlations between the two surveys suggest that teaching languages requires more than just strength of content knowledge and FL teachers may need assistance engaging students. Aditionally, it appears female novice Spanish teachers are more prone to attrition than teachers of other languages. The research holds implications for professional development opportunities as well as teacher preparation programs. 


e-TEALS ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-125
Author(s):  
Ana Ponce de Leão

Abstract UNESCO and many other organisations worldwide have been working on approaches in education to develop tolerance, respect for cultural diversity, and intercultural dialogue. Particularly, the Council of Europe has laid out guiding principles in several documents to promote intercultural competence, following Byram’s and Zarate’s efforts in integrating this important component in language education. The commitment to developing the notion of intercultural competence has been so influential that many countries, e.g., Portugal, have established the intercultural domain as a goal in the foreign language curricula. However, this commitment has been questioned by researchers worldwide who consider that action is needed to effectively promote intercultural competence. The research coordinated by Sercu, for example, suggests that, although foreign language teachers are willing to comply with an intercultural dimension, their profile is more compatible with that of a traditional foreign language teacher, rather than with a foreign language teacher, who promotes intercultural communicative competence. In this study, I propose to examine teachers’ perceptions and beliefs about intercultural communicative competence in a cluster of schools in Portugal and compare these findings with Sercu’s study. Despite a twelve-year gap, the present study draws similar conclusions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-46
Author(s):  
Mehmet DEMİREZEN

Accurate pronunciation is an important part of learning any language, and especially when non-native students are trained to be English language teachers. Good pronunciation is more than just mastering individual sounds since it also requires understanding intonation, stress, pitch and junctures. In this respect, first things first, two functional issues come to the stage: Spelling pronunciation versus relaxed pronunciation. Spelling pronunciation depends on the use of a pronunciation that is based on spelling that includes common pronunciation of the silent vowel and consonant letters. The converse of spelling pronunciation is pronunciation spelling which produces the creation of a new spelling form on the basis of pronunciation. In this study, the contrastive positioning of spelling pronunciation versus pronunciation spelling in English words, phrases, clauses, and sentences will be analyzed to train the English teachers.


2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hayriye Kayi-Aydar

The topic of language teacher identity receives strong attention in current scholarly literature. Understanding the complexities of identities that second/foreign language teachers construct is crucial because the ways teachers perceive themselves as professionals impact teacher development (e.g., Kanno & Stuart, 2011*), interactions with peers and colleagues (e.g., Kayi-Aydar, 2015*), pedagogical choices or classroom practices (e.g., Duff & Uchida, 1997*), and access to power and ownership of language (De Costa & Norton, 2017*; Varghese et al., 2016*), ultimately undergirding or undermining second/foreign language teaching (Varghese et al., 2016*).


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