Members are invited to nominate to join the committee. Nomination forms will be emailed and also available at the meeting. This year we are particularly seeking ATAR EALD teachers who can help with the coordination of exam writing and the Good Answer Guide. Training provided.
Guest presenters: Fading Footprints: Tracing EAL/D Teaching Courses at Australian universities
This presentation is based on a national research project funded by the Australian Council of TESOL Associations (ACTA) in 2024/2025. The project seeks to investigate why universities in Australia are not preparing Initial Teacher Education (ITE) students for the demands of teaching EAL/D students in schools. It responds to current media announcements (Bulter, 2022; Neilsen & Weinmann, 2022; The Educator, 2022; Steele, 2023), industry stakeholder concerns, and personal communications which have drawn attention to the chronic shortage of teachers emerging with EAL/D qualifications or even knowledge gained from single units of study relevant to teaching multilingual migrants or international students across Australia.
Progress on the project to date has taken the form of an audit of all the courses offered by universities nationally in the ITE space (How do Australian universities prepare pre-service teachers to teach EAL/D to multilingual learners in Australian classrooms?), recently published in a Special Issue of TESOL in Context (33/2, 2025), collection of data through a national scoping survey building on the last 2016 survey (ACTA, 2022, p. 17). The second phase of the project is already underway, interviewing thirty or more EAL/D teachers, leaders in schools, and academics involved with language education in universities across Australia. Our presentation will highlight the findings so far from our analysis of such large-scale data, further discussion about the implications of the findings and recommendations for ways forward in terms of advocacy in this space.
Bookings
Bookings are closed for this event.