Language pedagogy in Australia, North America and Europe has been influenced in the past 20 years by a sociocultural understanding of language and culture, which has asked teachers to adopt an intercultural approach, integrating critical cultural reflection within language learning. Due to the diversity of backgrounds, however, different groups of…

Action Research (AR) is recognised as an effective way for language teachers to extend teaching skills and gain more understanding of teaching, learning and the classroom environment (Burns, 2010). It can also be a useful but challenging experience for trainee language teachers. This paper reports on the experiences of Malaysian trainee primary…

There are now significant numbers of children who speak a language other than English when they enter the formal school system in Australia. Many of these children come from a language background that is entirely different from the school language. Many Indigenous children, however, come from creole-speaking backgrounds where their home language…

International practicum is disappearing from teacher education programs with the increasing pressures for "local experience". International practicum is seen as too different from local contexts to develop preservice teachers to meet professional standards. This study explores the teaching development of a group of 24 preservice teachers…

This article draws on data from a small-scale qualitative study conducted in Australia that explored how pre-service teachers engaged with students from culturally diverse backgrounds during practicum and how they understood their own ethnic identities. The findings of the study suggest that pre-service teachers have simplistic understandings of…

Many studies and papers have explored and critiqued the "what" and the "why" of working at the cultural interface of mainstream curricula and local Indigenous knowledge, but this project sought to understand the "how". Participants went beyond explorations of "cultural items" and worked in the overlap…

As populations in contemporary Western societies grow more diverse, the need for teachers to better understand and work with difference productively becomes increasingly critical (Allard & Santoro, 2006; D'Cruz, 2007). However, the literature on teacher education shows that historically, teacher education programs have aimed to address…