IELTS Research Reports

Wayne Sawyer and Michael SinghAt the same time as the number of international students has increased in universities in Australia, overthe last decade universities have suffered severe cutbacks to funding, resulting in widespread cutbacksto teaching hours:In a one year course what can you do? We now only have eight weeks contact in firstsemester and eight weeks contact in second semester – we are with the students for two tothree hours a week. (The course) has a one hour support session once a week during thoseeight weeks. There is not a lot we can do.This comment came from a university in a state which nominally has a mentor scheme for beginningteachers and academic staff feel that ‘Those mentors need to pick up the responsibility for supportingthe international students… because they are all experienced teachers, so they know what the situationis in the first term of when you are out on your own’.Sound pre-practicum familiarisation was also seen as of utmost importance. In some Faculties,LBOTE student-teacher support included pre-course school-based induction:This pre-course is only a three-to-four day course that allows students to have a placementin school. Usually I have about 30 students in this course, which is held the week beforetheir academic course starts. It’s not focused on language as much as on trying to givethem a grasp of the system itself, how it works, how it is interpreted in a particular school,the culture of that school, the ways in which students interact with teachers… There isconsideration of the language that teachers use in class for different purposes – for a task –for management. The student-teachers are placed with teachers in pairs; they shadow eithera teacher or a class.7.7 What have schools had to say about the English language proficiencyof student-teachers? What about other issues (e.g. acculturation intoAustralian schools)?Schools have legal and moral responsibilities to educate pupils and to attend to their welfare, both ofwhich can be affected if a teacher is not easily intelligible or cannot understand what a pupil mightbe saying. Moreover, through lack of ‘school culture’ knowledge, some LBOTE students behaveinappropriately at school – such as through having wrong expectations of the degree of support to beprovided to them; not taking the kind of initiative which Australian teachers expect; criticising thesupervising teacher’s methods; or not following disciplinary policies in the school correctly. For thesereasons, schools sometimes see these students as not functioning at a level required by them. This canlead to a culture in the schools that is critical of LBOTE students. Principals are sometimes perceivedas acting as gatekeepers and being reluctant to accept these students on practicum. Most academics feltthat schools tried to be accommodating on the whole, but recognised that schools had concerns aboutthe students’ preparation for teaching and about their language. Schools, these academics believed,needed to see that they had a joint role in the preparation of teachers:There is a need for closer connections with schools, more conversations about how thesestudent-teachers learn to teach, what good teaching is, how to support their learning andteaching. It’s not easy to address this issue. It needs collective effort over time.One group of academics saw ‘language’ in the schools as always being conceptualised as ‘speech’and ‘speech’ as ‘accent’, leading to LBOTE students being labelled ‘deficient’ and ‘unable to114 www.ielts.org