The Preparation of Teachers of English as an Additional Language around the World

Research, Policy, Curriculum and Practice

Nihat Polat, Laura Mahalingappa, Hayriye Kayi-Aydar, Nihat Polat, Laura Mahalingappa, Hayriye Kayi-Aydar

• Verlag: Multilingual Matters
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781788926171
• Thema: Education
• Thema: Professional Development

This book fills a critical gap in a neglected areain current educational research: international teacher education. It focuses on the preparation of teachers of English as an additional language (EAL) in several world regions. The book consists of chapters by researchers in well-established teacher education programs in 11 countries: Brazil, Canada, China, Finland, Greece, New Zealand, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Turkey and the United States of America. It takes a cross-national, comparative approach around four major focus areas: policy, research, curriculum and practice, offering critical implications that can help improve EAL teacher education programs in different parts of the world. Teacher education is an area that has great potential for international cross-pollination of ideas and actions, and this book represents an important first step along this road.

1Introduction

Nihat Polat, Laura Mahalingappa and Hayriye Kayi-Aydar

Explorations of macro-level issues in teacher education at the international level have been a trending topic in educational research for a while now. Among others, one reason for this interest is the strong correlation between teacher quality related measures and student learning outcomes (Darling-Hammond & Lieberman, 2012). This topic has, however, gained more attraction in recent years (Darling-Hammond, 2017), with a particular focus on the teacher education enterprise as a whole. Because as educators we know that ‘good teachers are made, not born that way’, the rationale to learn from how the ‘making’ of high-quality teachers happens throughout the world is self-evident. The following sequence of logic proves this point: (1) learning and teaching occur in every country around the world; (2) high-quality student learning is correlated with high-quality teaching; and (3) high-quality teachers are ‘made’ (not born that way). Therefore, to become better at ‘making high-quality’ teachers in our countries, it only makes sense that we find out how other people ‘make’ them in their countries.

Teacher educators and researchers have emphasized the importance of documenting and sharing ‘best’ policies and practices in teacher education programs in different parts of the world. Most recently, Darling-Hammond (2017), a prominent teacher educator, has underscored this very point, outlining different teacher education (in general) policies, practices and potential challenges in progressive change moving forward. Darling-Hammond (2017) cites two reasons why understanding the nature of teacher education around the globe is so important: ‘First, they [such comparative studies] broaden the view of what is possible. Further, international comparisons show how ideas work in practice at the system level’ (Darling-Hammond, 2017: 291). For this to happen, we need to understand global ‘perspectives’ on teaching and explore teacher education and development as a ‘system’, with all of the relevant parts that constitute it at both the initial preparation and in-service professional development levels, including policy, human resources, standards and curriculum, accreditations and quality assurance, among others.

This edited volume fills a critical gap in a highly neglected area of current educational research: international teacher education. This is an area that has great potential for the cross-pollination of ideas and actions. Within this genre, this volume focuses on the preparation of teachers of English as an additional language (EAL) in several world regions. In doing so, it takes a cross-national, comparative approach around four major focus areas: policy, research, curriculum and practice, offering critical implications that can help improve EAL teacher education programs in different parts of the world. We have taken this multifaceted approach because we believe that a true understanding of high-quality teacher education is possible only when all major factors contributing to its overall strength are explored simultaneously.

Along these lines, the scope of the content covered in each chapter is rather comprehensive in order to allow for a holistic understanding of the big picture. Each chapter offers analytic reviews and syntheses to illuminate the current status of the EAL teacher preparation programs in their country. The volume consists of chapters by highly accomplished researchers in well-established teacher education programs from 11 countries, offering a wide array of geographically and socioculturally diverse examples. These countries include Brazil, Canada, China, Finland, Greece, New Zealand, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Turkey and the USA. While it is practically impossible to identify objective criteria that would ensure a full representation of these programs in all parts of the world, the expert authors, in each chapter, present thorough information based on multiple national and institutional data sources regarding the state of the EAL teacher preparation programs in their contexts.

A good question here could be: Why these countries? What criteria and process did we use to determine the sample selection? Undoubtedly, no matter how hard one tries, in a volume like this, no criteria could be adequate to justify reasons for including some countries and not others. All assumptions we could make, and believe us, we tried many, resulted in numerous ‘buts’. For example, going with geographical location was an easy choice we considered, ‘but’ it implies a deterministic assumption based on location. Such an approach, we thought, would not allow us to recognize the differences among countries within the same region. For example, the Middle East alone comprises more than 15 countries. While they may share a common history at one point in time as well as some cultural and moral values, there are significant differences among them. Being in the same geographical region obviously does not determine the educational values or systems for those countries. That said, we aimed for a meaningful representation for each geographical region in our selection, although we must point out again that such selection is not meant to be a representation of each country within that region. Another route would be to select countries known for producing EAL teachers of the highest ‘quality’. We could not find solid research that would justify the use of this ‘quality’ criterion. Ultimately, taking a ‘principled eclecticism’ approach, we settled on three criteria that made the most sense given the main purpose of this volume.

Our first criterion was a pragmatic one. Because we could not include the whole sample (all countries in the world), we tried to offer the broadest selection of countries we could. In this way, if some of the hypotheses listed above are somewhat correct (e.g. regional differences), we still get to offer a wide selection of different regions. For example, from North (Canada) to South America (Brazil), Oceania (New Zealand) and Europe (Greece) to transcontinental countries like Russia and Turkey, this volume offers a very rich buffet of EAL programs. Our second criterion was also pragmatic. We asked which countries we are most familiar with (e.g. the USA, Turkey) as far as these aspects (see the chapter format) of EAL teacher education are concerned. Although all three of us work in the USA, Hayriye and Nihat are both graduates of English language teacher education programs in Turkey.

With our third criterion, we considered which countries we found particularly interesting due to certain social, cultural, economic, political, etc., differences. For example, in addition to its sociocultural particularities, Saudi Arabia’s new initiative Vision 2030 is intriguing with regard to potential transformations in the educational sphere. Beyond its size and the millions of English learners (perhaps the largest number of EFL learners in the world), its Confucian philosophy and cultural heritage make China a country of interest, especially in comparison with its geographical neighbor, South Korea.

Finally, as researchers and educators who consider the learning of additional languages as an empowerment tool and teachers as agents of progressive change for a more socially just and equitable world, we could not help but include Brazil, the country of the great critical pedagogue Paulo Freire, in this selection. Indeed, we are very excited about the potential critical contrasts readers of this volume can make, for example, between EAL in Brazil, from the global south, the periphery of late capitalism, and the USA, known as a ‘central’ country of the global north. As such, the inclusion of countries like Finland, the envy of many nations for its unique approach to teacher education, and New Zealand, a highly diverse nation built on its colonial past, makes this volume a very valuable collection.

We hope that this book will be a useful resource not only for teachers, teacher educators and government officials, but also for researchers interested in comparative teacher education in various world regions. We are not naïve about the moderating effects of sociocultural differences in any form of education, nor are we suggesting blanket (over)generalizations of the ‘great ideas’ or ‘signature pedagogies’ that the chapters included here might offer. Rather, as we describe later in this chapter, we claim these implications, acknowledging the caveat mindful of the particularities, practicalities and possibilities of each unique setting where these programs might be (Johnson & Golombek, 2016; Kumaravadivelu, 2006). In what follows, we describe the goals of this volume, followed by brief sections about why this book is needed, who its target audience is, and the values and theoretical views guiding EAL teacher education in different settings.

1. Goals of the Book

The goal of this book is to help teacher educators, policymakers, researchers and state education professionals, as well as teacher candidates and in-service EAL teachers, learn more about how EAL teachers are educated in different settings around the worl...