Abstract:

Communication about educational issues has moved into engaging teachers and researchers to discuss international topics and global aspects of education in their classes. Topicality of the study: Research areas such as Global Education are since about 40 years back well established and imply that education at schools needs to take an interest in important and even crucial areas for a better world. International communication is then necessary. The means of communication and the world’s lingua franca has come to be English and therefore teachers need to include issues of Global education in their teaching. In order to be able to succeed in communication internationally, European citizens will need the language (e g vocabulary, communication skills) and self-confidence to discuss matters such as climate change, migration and poverty in English.
The aim of the article: to reflect the attitude of future teachers towards global events in the world and how these issues are discussed with students in English lessons in Latvia and Sweden. The article will reflect the obtained data from the case study carried out over the same period in Sweden and Latvia.
Research methodology: By the use of interviews with teacher students, analyses will be carried out to study their attitudes towards global issues in the English language classroom at the upper primary school level (children aged 10 to 12).
Research findings: The results of the analysis of the data will provide information about similarities and discrepancies between teacher students from two highly different educational and cultural contexts in Europe. The findings will give a picture of teacher students’ views on issues that are central for international cooperation between Latvia and Sweden and thus suggest ways for working in a successful way with these results. The possible recommendations may be how to establish a common context with the similarities and how to work with challenges of the differences.

Keywords:

Communicative competence, global education, sustainable development.