Longtime passing: where does the time for preparing language teachers go?

As we are reminded by Stracke, Houston, Maclean and Scott (2011), a long time has passed since the many reviews and reports on language teacher education in Australia began to appear. As language teacher educators who seek to ground our current work in a historical narrative, we well remember the images of language teachers standing at the “crossroads” (Nicholas et al., 1996) and being portrayed as the “pivot of policy” (ALLC, 1996). Many of us still believe that the field of language teacher education is fragile and in need of much government attention if our upcoming Australian Curriculum Languages is to achieve its ambitious goals for student language learning in Australian schools.

This panel brings together language teacher educators from four Australian states and allows them to discuss the short time they have to spend on language teacher preparation along with key issues they perceive to be impacting the design and implementation of language teacher education for their contexts.
Issues include (i) the increasing policy and regulations impacting our program design, (ii) the crowded curriculum, (iii) preparing native speakers for the Australian classroom, (iv) the importance of the incountry experience, (v) developing a language-specific and generic stance, (vi) demands on the pre-service teachers regarding proficiency levels and pedagogical understandings, and (vii) the special considerations in preparing teachers for community languages schools. The panels’ views on the importance of collaboration across the arts/education divide will also be discussed.