Commentary

It is difficult to include all the relevant areas of language-sensitive education in a mind map. Depending on the context and whether teachers are working in primary, secondary or further education, priorities will vary. The areas and sub-areas that you listed no doubt reflect your and your colleagues’ priorities and preoccupations regarding language in teaching and teacher education. These arise directly from the challenges teachers experience in classrooms in their educational settings. Ideally, teacher educators and those supporting practising teachers need to create their own list of priority areas and sub-areas based on local research into learners’ needs and teachers’ classroom challenges. These priorities may also be determined in part by the language policy of the institution and of the national authority which oversees teacher education. However, such policies are not always made explicit. 

The main question is: how can teacher education help teachers to become more language-sensitive, especially in the priority areas for their specific educational settings and subjects? Building block 3 aims to address this question by suggesting how teacher education curricula or in-service programmes can be redeveloped to include more attention to language sensitivity. Building block 4 offers guidance on reshaping individual modules or courses to include a strand addressing language-sensitive education in more detail, while Building block 5 is concerned with ensuring that language sensitivity has a central place in teaching practice and lesson observation.

As regards questions (a), (b) and (c), the suggested ‘Profiles’ and tasks in Building block 6 aim to show in more detail and with examples how specific aspects of language sensitivity may be priorities for different categories of teachers. To complement Building Block 1, the document provided here offers a list of areas of language-sensitive teaching that is more comprehensive than that offered in the figure above.