Native English speaking teachers and Taiwanese English teachers' professional identity

The study found that Native English Speaking Teachers (NESTs) helped Taiwanese English teachers define their weaknesses, strengths, roles and values through relationality. NESTs brought competing discourses to the profession. In addition, team teaching has become a site of tension threatening Taiwanese English teachers in activating their professional agency.

Language, technology and the law : anti-plagiarism software and students' academic writing

Plagiarism is of grave concern for academic institutions in the twenty-first
century. Institutions utilise plagiarism policies, honour codes and regulations to ensure students develop a sense of educational integrity. Technology has recently afforded new methods for staff to detect plagiarism – through antiplagiarism software. This paper explores perspectives of seven teachers across five faculties to Turnitin.com (an anti-plagiarism software package) at a large Australian university. The findings indicate that software such as Turnitin.com may assist in the quest to detect text-matching, and perhaps reduce plagiarism. It should not, however, be considered the panacea for plagiarism. Plagiarism policies should also reflect cognisance of the existence of a 'plagiarism continuum' (Sutherland-Smith, 2003) through the use of technology. This research highlights the broader need for institutions to reformulate plagiarism policies in light of cross-cultural perspectives of authorship and attribution of text.

Global education : travel and new imaginaries for teachers' work

This workshop reports on Learning across Latitude - a trans-national collaborative project that joined teacher education students from Australia, Denmark and Malaysia. The project offered a unique opportunity for students to explore concepts and dialogue with their teacher education peers in three countries. Over a two week period, 116 students in 13 forums posted 365 messages into a forum space hosted by Deakin University. 
During week 1, students introduced themselves to each other and discussed their reasons to become teachers, qualities of a good teacher and the issues facing teaching in their country. Because many students life experiences are local in experience such a project expands notions of being a teacher in a global world. Student’s responses to qualities of a good teacher were analysed to build knowledge of global teacher identities.
During week 2 students discussed what it means to be a good citizen in their country. How is citizenship as a concept explained across three countries? In the virtual discussions for Malaysian and Danish students, English was a second language. These forums opened new awareness for all students of the challenges of conversing with English as second language students.
This project illustrated that the changing contexts of education and globalisation means new opportunities and challenges for teacher education at local and global levels. Implications from Learning across Latitudes suggest possibilities for teacher education to build global citizenship, and teacher identities as technology enables such possibilities.

The Civic School : Australian-Indonesian professional collaboration to model and audit the development of democratic primary classrooms and teacher language using the index for inclusion

The study is a pilot project in Australian-Indonesian institutional collaboration for the professional development of primary school teachers in West Sumatra in citizenship education. Senior staff in the department of Pancasila and Citizenship Education at the State University of Padang (UNP), West Sumatra initiated the project. UNP staff sought the collaboration of the Faculty of Education at the University of Tasmania for bringing about and sustaining changes in teacher practice needed to implement the new civic goals in the 1999 Suplemen. The Index for Inclusion was used to model and audit the development of democratic primary classrooms and language use in a cluster of Padang schools in West Sumatra. The paper describes the background to the project and how the Index for Inclusion was understood during the initial two-week implementation phase by teachers and school principals. The significance of the study lies in the potential of the Index for Inclusion internationally to citizenship education, a field of education that was not considered in the initial development of the Index project and the contribution of the multiple fields of inquiry to the evolving theoretical understandings of inclusive education.

Cross cultural perspectives of teachers : a study in three countries

In a shrinking world where globalization has blurred the boundaries across nation states and cultural divides, limitations on intercultural communication can readily give rise to glib generalizations and lack of understanding of diversity. Acknowledging the key role of teachers in shaping the views of future generations, this paper reports on the first stage of a research study on the intercultural understanding of teachers in Australia, Japan, and Thailand. Overall, the teacher participants had diverse cross-cultural experience, differing both in extent and nature of the contact. The methodology used a common survey instrument, except for its language of presentation. However, instead of using a traditional comparative approach to contrast responses of the three target groups, the study asked teachers to provide their perceptions of prevailing world views of people in their own AND the other two countries. The reciprocal nature of the observations provides a powerful methodology to explore perceived intercultural similarities and differences. The article also considers problems associated with response set in investigations of this kind. Three scales are considered — change through intervention, symbolic inner self, and independent thought and action — and the data reveal some similarities but also some striking differences in perceptions across countries. The differences signal a lack of intercultural understanding which is being explored further in a second, qualitative stage of the research. The findings indicate the need for increasing shared programs, exchanges and other opportunities for reciprocal relations that foster genuine dialogue, partnership and intercultural understanding between countries.

Explaining ourselves (to ourselves) : english teachers, professional identity and change

This article discusses the professional identity of English teachers. It draws on discussions held at the International Federation for the Teaching of English conference. Issues addressed include professional standards formulated by teachers of English in the United States: the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and, in Australia: the Standards for Teachers of English Language and Literacy in Australian (STELLA); the way in which the professional identities of teachers are crucially bound up with their disciplinary fields; and the need for English teachers to confront the conditions of their work.

Public and personal domains : professional standards for teachers of English in Australia

For many teachers the term ‘professional standards’ conjures up notions of benchmarks against which to measure their performance. This is to locate standards in a public domain that is external to individual teachers, defining their professional role largely in terms of their accountability to other stakeholders in education. The following article argues an alternative view of standards as mediating between public and personal domains. Those domains should remain distinct – indeed, sometimes they may exist in a productive tension – but for standards to have any purchase with the profession they must be personally meaningful. The author draws on both his experience in teaching graduate English students in the pre-service Diploma in Education course at Monash University and his research in a national project to develop subject specific standards for primary and secondary teachers of English. The project, Standards for Teachers of English Language and Literacy in Australia (STELLA), is federally funded and involves a consortium of universities, state government bodies and the two English teaching associations, whose members constitute the panels of teachers at the heart of the project.

Introducing creative language learning in Japan through educational drama

Educational Drama as a teaching and learning methodology is already widely in use and well accepted by Australian teachers and students. This paper reports on a study in which the author investigated Japanese primary school students' and teachers' responses to educational drama as a pedagogical tool in their English language classes. The participants had no prior experience of drama in education. Along with the participants' responses, the applicability of educational drama as a teaching method for the Japanese teachers is also discussed. The author, as a teacher-researcher, used action research methods for this study. It became evident that educational drama tended to motivate the Japanese students' foreign language learning of English, by providing them with an opportunity for a higher level of engagement and participation in learning. In the study, the students showed enhancement of the skills necessary for learning, including social, communication, linguistic, non-linguistic and problem-solving skills.

The waterhole : using educational drama as a pedagogical tool in a foreign language class at a public primary school in Japan

This study investigates Japanese primary school students’ and teachers’ responses to educational drama as a pedagogical tool in their English language classes. Along with the participants’ responses, the applicability of educational drama as a teaching method for the Japanese teachers is also discussed. The study was conducted in Japan as ateacher-researcher using participatory action research methods. The participants of the study are three Year Six classes and their teachers in a public primary school in Japan. Educational drama is introduced as an alternative teaching and learning method to these participants who have had no experience of drama in education.

Heteroglossia : a space for developing critical language awareness?

This paper reports on research into the challenges of implementing a critical writing pedagogy within a teacher education program in Australia. Participants in this study are student teachers enrolled in a compulsory subject, “Language and Literacy in Secondary School”, a subject requiring them to develop a knowledge of the role of language and literacy across the secondary school curriculum and to show personal proficiency in literacy as part of graduate outcomes for teacher education dictated by the State Government of Victoria. To develop an understanding of the way that language has shaped their lives, students write a narrative about their early literacy experiences – a task which they all find very challenging, especially in comparison with the formal writing of other university subjects. Rather than simply reminiscing about their early childhood, they are encouraged to juxtapose voices from the past and the present, and to combine a range of texts within their writing. Later in the semester they revisit these accounts of their early literacy experiences and, in a separate piece of writing, endeavour to place these accounts within the contexts of theories and debates they have encountered in the course of completing this unit. The students’ writing provides a small window on how they are experiencing their tertiary education and their preparation as teachers, including the managerial controls that are currently shaping university curriculum and pedagogy. We argue that such heteroglossic texts (Bakhtin, 1981) prompt students to stretch their repertoires as language-users, enabling them to develop a socially critical awareness of language and literacy, including the literacy practices in which they engage as university students.

Are we raising the standards of language use or just playing games?

Given the current state of play with respect to literacy 'crises' in Western democracies, this article revisits the 'language games' that often inform these concerns, examining their rules and who benefits from them. It argues that to focus narrowly on the technical aspects of language, as the current emphasis does, misses the point of what is at stake for students: those who advocates claim to want to help. Drawing on twenty semi-structured interviews and observations of teachers in primary and secondary schools within Queensland (Australia), the article outlines four perspectives on language use and how these variously position students as literate and illiterate. It concludes that we now need a different game plan to address students' use of language, one that provokes a stance and praxis in keeping with a more inclusive politics and which provides real challenges to broader social constraints.

Life after CELTA : a precarious transition into English language teaching

The thesis examined the transition of new teachers with a skills-based Cambridge Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA) into diverse English Language Teaching sites around the world. The mixed methods study demonstrated that the first year of teaching was a precarious journey for most of these teachers.

Language, experience and professional learning (what Walter Benjamin can teach us)

This essay raises questions about how language educators might construct and further develop their epistemology of practice in and through the situations in which they work from day to day. The occasion for this paper is our work as guest editors of a special issue of L-1: Educational Studies in Language and Literature, when we invited L1 teachers to reflect on the role that language plays in their professional learning, whether it be in the form of conversations with peers, reflective writing, or by other means. We begin this essay by locating our reflections within our current policy context, namely the standards-based reforms that have come to dominate educational thinking around the world, offering a brief critique of the values and attitudes embedded within them. We then outline a philosophical framework as an alternative to the world-view reflected by such reforms, focusing specifically on the work of Walter Benjamin. In the final sections, we review our work as guest editors of the special issue of L-1, reflecting on what we have learned from the papers we have assembled for this issue, and locating our learning within the philosophical framework that we have drawn from Benjamin. We argue that it is timely for language educators to articulate the assumptions that inhere within their work, in contradistinction to the common sense embedded in standards. Thus we might begin to reconceptualise the relation between language, experience and professional learning in opposition to the hegemony of standards.