Teacher Voices on Thoughts About Language and Culture Teaching

Abstract

This chapter reports findings from semi-structured interviews of the same four teachers discussed in the previous chapter. The interviews investigated personal background and current school context, general beliefs about culture, and culture in language teaching. Findings suggest approaches to language teaching are influenced by a diverse range of factors including educational and family background, individual understandings of culture, personal cross-cultural experiences after arriving in Australia, learner-cohort profiles in the current teaching context, and perceptions of what should be taught to whom in the current teaching context. The chapter also contains descriptions of each teacher’s interculturality, that is, their intercultural competence as defined in a synthesis of literature. This has relevance to language teacher capacity to develop intercultural competence in their students, which in turn may influence success in language learning.