Language Teacher Education
As a committed group of language teacher educators, we aim to offer language teaching practitioners and researchers professional and academic development opportunities at masters and doctoral levels.
Through our MA programmes, doctoral community, research projects, and other activities, the Language Teacher Education (LTE) team seeks to provide informed, relevant, and stimulating opportunities for experienced language teachers and researchers to reflect on, and further develop, their understandings of teaching and learning languages in their particular contexts as well as increasing their awareness of how their locally-articulated understanding can be developed further by alternative perspectives on language teaching and learning.
We focus especially, but not exclusively, on the particularities of Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). More than other languages, English functions as an inter-national and intra-national lingua franca and as a key medium for intercultural communication. But it is also a language associated with colonialism. As a result, it has many varieties (World Englishes) and it is used for diverse functions in its many different contexts of use. Any exploration of particular TESOL contexts must acknowledge these complex characteristics of English.
We believe that, through critical engagement with locally-situated practice and a broader sense of professional membership, TESOL practitioners can play a central role in enabling English to play an equitable role in the twenty-first century processes of internationalisation and globalisation in which information technologies figure so prominently. Given this technological prominence, we are deeply concerned with the role of educational technologies in language education. This concern extends to the use of such technologies in providing the reflective spaces on our MA and doctoral programmes.