Teachers as Mediators in the Foreign Language Classroom

By (author) Dr. Michelle Kohler

Publication date:

12 January 2015

Publisher

Multilingual Matters

Dimensions:

210x148mm
6x8"

ISBN-13: 9781783093069

Language teachers are key figures in preparing young people for participation in an increasingly multilingual and culturally diverse world, yet little is known about how they go about this in practice. This book uses examples of classroom interaction to reveal how teachers of languages act as intercultural mediators and the implications of this for practice. To date, there has been little exploration of how teachers mediate language and culture learning from an intercultural perspective, and what underlies their mediation practices in terms of their conceptions of intercultural language teaching and learning. This book offers an account of what teachers are thinking, feeling and doing as they enact an intercultural perspective on language teaching and learning.

1. Introduction
2. Understandings of Language and Culture in Language Teaching and Learning
3. Teachers’ Understandings of Language and Culture, and their Relationship
4. Understandings of Mediation
5. Teachers’ Ways of Mediating
6. Understanding Language Teachers as Mediators and the Implications for Intercultural Language Teaching and Learning
7. Appendices
8. Appendix 1: Materials used in Establishing and Guiding the Study Overall
9. Appendix 2: Examples of Materials Developed by Participating Teachers
10. Appendix 3: Data Analysis
11. References

This interesting, well-written and important volume takes readers into the promising and exciting domain of intercultural communication in which speakers are not just representing, but enacting, different cultures in discourse. Michelle Kohler's highly readable and theoretically well-grounded contribution to this emerging field of specialisation is a tribute to her but it also distils a now well established Australian tradition of intercultural theorising that is attracting worldwide interest.