Toward interculturality in language teacher training

Abstract

The place of intercultural education in language teaching has experienced many transformations over the last few decades. Globalization and increasing interculturality have immensely influenced educational policies, teaching practices and teacher training. In line with the recent needs of learners and teachers, it has become important to modify not only curricula but also teacher education programs. However, improving the quality of teacher education programs and modifying them in line with the recent needs of the society are highly complex phenomena. In today's foreign language education context, it is crucial for language teachers to have a knowledge of intercultural education to keep up with the changes in the field and to understand the attitude of language learners. As intercultural education is currently considered an important part of foreign language learning, it is also important for the language teacher to be able to introduce and teach interculturality successfully. In that sense, it is becoming a requirement for language teachers to be provided with intercultural training and to provide intercultural training to their students in language classrooms. In Turkey, there are studies focusing on the relationship between ELT and interculturality. Yet, in many of the studies, the focus relies on how to develop pre-service English language teachers' intercultural competence. The aspect of teaching pre-service English language teachers how to teach interculturality has rarely been studied. Therefore, this study aims to fill this gap in the existing literature by exploring the impact of intercultural training on pre-service English language teachers with the aim of helping them integrate intercultural components into ELT. It also aims at exploring the processes that pre-service English language teachers go through during the training. This study is a qualitative case study which investigates the perceptions of pre-service English language teachers concerning intercultural education in one particular English Teacher Education Department in Turkey. An Intercultural Education course has been designed and given in order to assess its impact on 10 fourth-year pre-service English language teachers' perceptions of the role of intercultural education in language classrooms. The data for this study have been collected through diaries, and the constant comparison method has been employed to analyze the qualitative data. Four categories and twelve themes have emerged from the analyzed data. The results have indicated that the intercultural training encourages the pre-service teachers to question their preconceived ideas by offering them deeper insights into the field of intercultural education and helps them adopt a more critical and reflective approach toward the role of interculturality in language teaching.