IELTS Research Reports

Learning to play the ‘classroom tennis’ well:IELTS and international students in teacher educationabout how (pupils) should learn or what teachers can do. That can be difficult for them tonegotiate, becoming more open and flexible.The university does not provide any fund for the teacher education camp other than for the academicstaff. Over the years this camp has been reduced from one week to two-days-one night. Typically, suchstrategies are funded by the Faculties. However, many universities have decided to centralise studentsupport services previously provided by Faculties, often then tending to render these services invisible,thereby reducing their usage and thus any claims for having such support.7.5 Are other issues more important than just language in supporting thesestudents (e.g. becoming familiar with Australian schools)?Academics see courses in which students have to go into the field and ‘perform’(e.g. teaching,nursing) as raising particular issues. All international-oriented programs are geared towards testing andaddressing language, but academics argue that this is only one dimension of such ‘performance’ and issecondary to ‘adjustment’:The local students have a familiarity with the context and the cultural settings; it can makethem look as though they know more than they really do. It can make them look moreproficient compared to international students who are unfamiliar with the settings in whichthey’ll be working. … the first four-to-five weeks of the year, just before the practicumare always full of concerns about interacting with school (pupils), cultural issues andlanguage issues, ‘How am I going to understand what the student says?’ ‘How am I goingto know whether the student is understanding?’ As student-teachers they are very often veryconcerned about their own image in the first teaching round. They’re more concerned abouttheir teaching and themselves as teachers often than they are concerned about the studentsand their learning … they’re often concerned about their own image and what students willthink of them. This is a very typical across all teacher education courses.Familiarisation with Australian schools is a huge issue. Most academics argued that the biggest issuesarose in practicum when students had to face both the foreignness of general Australian culture andthe culture of Australian schooling. Many LBOTE students are from very different classroom cultureswith different classroom dynamics. Academics strongly identified an issue of the disjunction betweenhow their students were taught at school and ‘how we teach here’. Some said the students tended tomove into/favour a lecture delivery in teaching. LBOTE students who were residents rather than onstudent visas and who had some previous teaching experience in their home country could experienceeven greater problems:They may have very well been able to teach English as a Foreign Language; that’sabsolutely fine. But they come into the school (and) their biggest problem can be ‘howto be’ in an Australian educational institution; how to relate to peers, how to relate toyour supervisor, what your responsibilities might be. They need special preparation andacculturation to the Australian education system before going into schools. … It is thoselocal people we’re actually letting down because they haven’t had to take an IELTs testbecause they’re already citizens.One academic talked of the problem of language in the practicum as the biggest issue. Part of thisconcerns spoken delivery, but the key problem is with interaction, especially interactive questioning.Students can ask a question of pupils, then ignore the response because they do not understand it, soIELTS Research Reports Volume 11111