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No one graduating from school can any longer have the illusion to have completed her or his learning career, nor to live in a monocultural society. Quite on the contrary, learning will be the major business of the professional future of anyone who now leaves school. Moreover, the multicultural nature of current societies constitutes an additional major dimension of any person's life and requires growth in intercultural competence along the lifespan. This is a book, in which various pathways toward the development of teacher competencies in promoting learner autonomy and intercultural competence are discussed. It focuses on the potential of action research, self-reflection, constructive learning and self-report activities for teacher development, offering a number of more theoretically oriented chapters on teacher beliefs, intercultural competence, learner autonomy, action research and eLearning. It also documents a number of case studies in which teacher educators have tried to support teachers in exploring and, possibly, developing their own attitudes and beliefs regarding learner autonomy and intercultural competence, and regarding ways to promote learner autonomy and foster intercultural competence amongst their students and in themselves as professionals in teaching.
List of contents
Contents: Lies Sercu/Manuel Jiménez-Raya: Introduction - Adri Elsen/Oliver St.-John: Learner autonomy and intercultural competence - Lies Sercu/Oliver St.-John: Teacher beliefs and their impact on teaching practice: a literature review - Lies Sercu: Foreign language teachers and intercultural competence. What keeps teachers from doing what they believe in? - Antoinette Camilleri-Grima: Pedagogy for autonomy, teachers' attitudes and institutional change: a case study - Enrica Flamini/Manuel Jiménez Raya: Action Research: Professional development through enquiry - Ragnar Aagard/Helga Deeg/Enrica Flamini/Kees van Esch: Action research as a way to professional development - Flávia Vieira: Reflective teacher development towards pedagogy for autonomy in schools: promoting and understanding change through pedagogical inquiry - Angela McFarlane/Anton Bradburn/Agnes McMahon/Nel Roche: The potential of e-learning in the professional development of teachers - Richard Fay/Leah Davcheva: The development of language teachers' understandings of intercultural communicative competence: a Bulgarian distance learning case study - Diane Slaouti: Learning about online learning: a situated approach - Manuel Jiménez Raya/Lies Sercu: Concluding remarks.
About the author
The Editor: Manuel Jiménez Raya is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Granada where he lectures on second language acquisition and foreign language teaching methodology. His research interests focus on learner autonomy, learning strategies, and teacher education. He has published several articles and co-authored several books on various aspects of foreign language teaching methodology.
Lies Sercu is Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Teacher Education Centre of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. She teaches foreign language teaching methodology courses and has been involved in in-service teacher education for many years. Her research concerns the acquisition of vocabulary and intercultural competence in an educational context.
