Preparing Pre-service Teachers for Multicultural Classrooms

Preservice EAL teaching as emotional experiences: Practicum experience in an Australian secondary school

“…As a result, apart from the mentor teacher, who Maria did not find adequately supportive, she did not have any other source of support. Tensions between desired and provided support have been reported in the literature as an important factor causing negative experiences during the practicum (Farrell, 2001(Farrell, , 2008Premier & Miller, 2010). Therefore, it is recommended that more effective support systems from both university staff and school mentors should be implemented and university-school partnership be consolidated to support preservice teachers' socialisation into the context of teaching practice (Gan, 2014).…”

“…One of the central practicum issues is the discrepancy between teacher education course work and classroom realities in the practicum (Premier & Miller, 2010). Premier and Miller's (2010) findings suggest that preservice teacher education, including EAL teacher education, failed to prepare student teachers to address the needs of students in multicultural classrooms in Australia, consequently causing frustrations among preservice teachers. Lack of support for preservice teachers during the practicum is another key issue.…”

The Curriculum for English Language Teacher Education in Australian and Vietnamese Universities

“…Specifically, Treehills University's curriculum was strong in the domains of contextual knowledge and pedagogical knowledge and skills. These are very important domains of knowledge for English language teachers in Australia where great cultural and linguistic diversity is a dominant feature of school contexts (Fradd & Lee, 1998;Miller, 2011;Premier & Miller, 2010). However, a noticeable problem of Treehills University's curriculum was that it did not include any unit that explicitly developed subject matter knowledge for English language teachers because of limited course length and double foci which provided opportunity for preservice teachers to develop subject matter knowledge in the second area (e.g., Arts, Music and Business) but not English language.…”

Catering for EAL/D Students’ Language Needs in Mainstream Classes: Early Childhood Teachers’ Perspectives and Practices in One Australian Setting

“…Studies on teacher management of EAL/D students in Australian mainstream classrooms are few but some work has been done by Cross, Gibbons, Miller, Premier and Windle (Cross, 2009a;Gibbons, 2002Gibbons, , 2008Miller & Windle, 2010;Premier & Miller, 2010). Mirroring comments made by de Jong in the US (2013), Cross has suggested that mainstream literacy education in Australia is 'essentially monolingual in orientation' (Cross, 2011, p. 2).…”