Ethnic minority teachers' perceived concerns, challenges and expectations prior to teaching practicums

Diversification of teaching force has been the key approach being adopted by English-majority countries to address the needs of ever-increasing diverse cultural and linguistic student populations. More approaches are being adopted to recruit and retrain overseas trained teachers to diversify the teaching force in Australia. One of such innovative accreditation pathways is an alternative mode of Master of Teaching programmes, offered in collaboration with Institute of Community Languages (SICLE) at the University of Sydney, Western Sydney University (WSU) and Australian Catholic University (ACU), to retrain community languages schools’ teachers. Teaching practicum is a key component that the Master of Teaching programmes adopt to bridge the theory – practice gap. Prior to their first teaching practicum, little is known about community languages teachers’ preparedness for their first teaching practicum in Australian classrooms, it is not clear what teaching competencies they expect to acquire and their views of the major concerns and challenges they might encounter in Australian classrooms. To address this gap in literature, semi-structured interviews are being conducted with community language teachers from WSU (n=20) and ACU (n=10), who are undertaking Master of Teaching programmes secondary and primary respectively, to upgrade their overseas qualifications to become teachers in NSW schools. The interview are being conducted and recorded through the use of videoconferencing software-Zoom. The interview data will be transcribed verbatim and a descriptive thematic analysis will be performed. The results of the current study, limitations, recommendations for future research, and implications of the study for policymaking will be discussed