A New Apprenticeship in Language Teacher Education

• In Event: Preparing Teachers to Work With English Language Learners and Immigrant Students

Abstract

This paper presents an innovative approach to addressing student teachers’ preconceptions about teaching and learning in their discipline in an initial teacher education (ITE) programme for language teachers in Ireland. Student language teachers undertake a course in a language which they do not know and are required to reflect on their experience from the perspective of both learner and teacher. The rationale here is that through a forced return to their “apprenticeship of observation”(Lortie 1975), student teachers with a new dual perspective of learner and teacher may question some of their beliefs about the nature of teaching and learning in general and in their discipline.

Author

• Ann Devitt, Trinity College Dublin