IELTS Research Reports

Learning to play the ‘classroom tennis’ well:IELTS and international students in teacher education5 LBOTE TEACHER EDUCATION STUDENTS’ PERSPECTIVESStudents in one university’s Faculty of Education were interviewed as a focus group on theirperceptions of English language proficiency issues. These students were from a metropolitanuniversity which had created a specific secondary teacher education course for students oninternational student visas. These students’ first degrees had been undertaken in a country in whichthe majority language was not English. Ten students took part in the focus group. One student wasJapanese, one Sri Lankan and the rest Chinese or Indian. They represented the teaching areas ofEnglish, Mathematics, English as a Second Language, Japanese, Chinese and Social Sciences. All hadgained an overall IELTS score to enter the course of between 6.5 and 7.5. All had completed their fullpracticum requirements and most had completed the course. The focus group responses are reportedbelow by question.5.1 Having been in your teacher education course now for some time, what areyour views on the demands of the course in terms of your English languageproficiency?Students listed their specific language-related problems as follows:■■■■■■■■■■becoming familiar with the colloquial language and Australian idiom - both with respect totheir fellow (local) students and with respect to their practicum pupils (one student referredto his pupils’ use of ‘the ‘like’ word’). All students referred to their pupils as ‘speakingvery casually’ and contrasted this with their own schooling (both in learning English andalso in their L1). The fact that their pupils’ use of a more colloquial language was simplyevidence of being comfortable in their own L1 may have been recognised by the students,but their focus was on this language as a barrier to their communication with pupils.the academic English demands of their course, both in terms of academic writingconventions and of the language of instructionthe issue of accent. This was an issue in their understanding of others, but especiallyin others’ understanding of them, including lecturers, fellow students and theirpracticum pupilscertain pronunciation conventions, which differed between countries. Speed of speakingwas also, of course, a related issuesemantic differences. This especially impacted in schools and especially for MathematicsMethod students. Indian students used the example of the phrase ‘2 into 3’meaning ‘2x 3’ in their own school education – semantically the reverse of the case in Australianschooling, where the term into refers to division. These differences had caused someproblems in communicating with their classes, necessitating intervention by supervisingteachers. Thus, for some students, the language of the subject itself was sometimesslightly problematicSome of the language issues which they themselves identified may seem to be largely those whichany person trying to cope in a foreign language might encounter. However, what may be ordinarilyperceived as minor issues (e.g. teenage colloquialism) become magnified in the situation ofcommunicating with pupils on practicum. The much more public ‘performance’ of English in all of itsmodes - especially speaking, writing and listening - is a major issue for teacher education students onpracticum. This in turn means that the linguistic factors identified here take on a greater urgency thanis the case for other users of English-as-a-foreign-language. One stark example of this is the case ofIELTS Research Reports Volume 1199