Language educators in Australia and Finland are expected to foster intercultural understanding within foreign language education. This paper presents findings from a qualitative case study focusing on theoretical and practical intercultural understanding in secondary school language education. The data for this study includes lesson observations…

Recent years have witnessed rapid growth in language learning within online collaborative learning projects constructed between educational institutions in different cultural and pedagogic contexts. This qualitative case study investigated the role of teacher communication in a short online project between language classes in secondary schools in…

This paper presents a comparative curricular inquiry of teacher education programs of Chinese as a foreign language in China and Australia. While there is an increasing demand for qualified Chinese language teachers both within China and Western countries, pre-service teacher training is regarded as one of the major factors in impeding success in…

There have been many positive claims made concerning the benefits of learning through a pedagogy which makes use of an interactive whiteboard (IWB), leading to a rapid acquisition and implementation of the IWB in schools. There is more limited research, however, of the effectiveness of the IWB in language learning and, in particular, in the…

It is increasingly common for schools to form partnerships with schools in the countries of languages learned in the classroom. While there has been substantial investigation of language and culture learning in the context of tertiary study abroad, there has been limited research attention to pedagogical interventions which may support learning in…

In late 2008, the Australian Government announced funding for a national collaborative project to develop a curriculum framework for courses of study in Chinese (Mandarin), Indonesian, Japanese, and Korean for "heritage speakers" of these languages at the senior secondary school level. This article examines some of the issues surrounding…

In the development of intercultural language learning, limited research has been conducted on language learners' negotiation of identity and cultural memberships. There is little research in particular on intercultural identity in young (primary school) language learners. With the global growth of languages in the primary school, it is timely to…