Christine Gillions on Challenges Faced by Teachers in Meeting the Needs of International Students

Christine Gillions on Challenges Faced by Teachers in Meeting the Needs of International Students

Reporter: What sort of challenges do teachers face in meeting the needs of, and working with, international students?

Christine Gillions: There are many challenges and meeting them is what makes this exciting and challenging job appeal to me. Major challenges include:

Being aware of and utilising the great diversity of prior knowledge and learning experiences brought to the classroom by students from many different education systems;

Being aware of and being sensitive to the wide range of cultural factors, and then passing this on to mainstream teachers (this can be a difficult cultural challenge for some mainstream teachers);

Being committed to reflective practices and program evaluation in the very unpredictable and ever-changing teaching environment of international students;

Developing appropriate educational provisions which respond to the many different experiences and aspirations among international students;

Being able to scaffold the international students' learning and language development appropriately - a challenge because of the wide range of cultures, different exposure levels to Australian culture and different levels of English at point of entry among a school's cohort of International students.

Staying informed of and educated in recent research in the Second Language Learning and the TESOL field;

Bringing the school's management, teachers and support staff to a level where cultural diversity and different cultural needs are accepted, celebrated, and utilised across all aspects of the school;

Possessing effective classroom management strategies to deal with those international students who have been sent abroad for behaviour reasons, rather than academic ones;

Being regarded as a professional body within the education field in too many schools the ESL teachers are not regarded as real' teachers with real' jobs and without this professional understanding and respect it is extremely difficult to get the support, funding and resources (material and human) to meet the needs of the international students.

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