Professional development programmes for teachers moving from majority to minoritised language medium education: lessons from a comparative study

Abstract

Education through the medium of a minoritised language is widely regarded as a critical component of language revitalisation initiatives. Given the demographic and social position of many minoritised languages, however, it may not be easy to find teachers who are fluent and literate in the language, confident about using and teaching it, and prepared for the demands of working in classrooms where the language is the medium of instruction.

Developing language-aware immersion teacher education: identifying characteristics through a study of immersion teacher socialisation

“…However, we are aware that this is also true for most teachers in additive bilingual educational programmes around the world (Peltoniemi, 2015;Cammarata & Ó Ceallaigh, 2018;McPake, McLeod, O'Hanlon, Fassetta, & Wilson 2016). Therefore, immersion teachers without immersion teacher education are -regrettably -representative of the profession.…”

Identifying space for mainstreaming multilingual pedagogies in European initial teacher education policies

“…A heightened sensitivity to content-specific language and plurilingual communication, as well as bilingual development and multicultural orientation, may raise specific concerns among subject/content teachers who may not have been previously educated to adopt a linguistically sensitive perspective in their content teaching. The same goes for initial teacher educators who should help future teachers adopt this approach (Cammarata and Ó Ceallaigh, 2018; Leavy et al, 2018; McPake et al, 2017). We argue that the idea of mainstreaming MPs in and through ITE should be based on the general pedagogical principles and knowledge shared by all teachers and that the basic theoretical frameworks should showcase teachers’ general pedagogical knowledge, content knowledge, professional beliefs, self-regulation and motivation (Blömeke and Delaney, 2012; Blömeke et al, 2015; see also Lucas and Villegas, 2013).…”