LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION: RESPONDING TO THE DEMAND FOR TEACHERS OF GLOBAL LANGUAGES

While the demand for teachers of modern foreign languages has declined, particularly in Europe, the global need for trained teachers of English and Chinese as second languages has grown substantially. The current status of Chinese and English as global languages has made them desirable and important from a learner’s perspective. This new demand for these languages has created a need for competent and qualified teachers. This paper reports on an innovative master’s degree which attempts to prepare both English and Chinese teachers for international careers. The MA in International Language Education offered at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology attempts to address, in a single program, the needs of teachers of English and Chinese. Through a combination of shared foundation and separate language-specific courses, the program aims to equip graduates with language teaching competencies derived from best practices in the teaching of Chinese and English, while respecting the different linguistic properties of each language. The paper examines, in particular, how common foundation courses in Second Language Acquisition and Language Teaching Methodology manage to address the needs of future teachers of Chinese and English.

At the same time, the paper recognizes that the teaching English and Chinese as second languages has tended to adopt different approaches. While English teachers have been encouraged to adopt communicative or task-based approaches, teachers of Chinese have been concerned primarily with developing accuracy on the part of their learners. To some extent, these differences of emphasis in teaching reflect the peculiar linguistic properties of the English and Chinese languages. Learners of Chinese need to develop high levels of accuracy in order to communicate even at elementary level, while learners of English can achieve basic communicative competence without the same attention to accuracy because of basic differences in the ways the two languages operate. The paper reports on how such challenges are addressed in the international language education degree.