Preparing Teachers across the Curriculum to Teach Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Learners: Investigating the Effect of Technology-enabled Mentoring on Pedagogical Language Knowledge

As Australian classrooms become increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse, teacher education programs need to provide effective training in the teaching of students who speak English as an additional language (EAL). Scientific language poses unique challenges for EAL learners, yet many teachers do not have the theoretical or practical knowledge to analyse and explain the language that underpins scientific concepts. This study will investigate the effects of a series of online mentoring exchanges between science pre-service teachers (PSTs) and expert EAL teachers, on the development of PSTs’ pedagogical language knowledge (PLK) in science. PLK is the language knowledge a teacher needs to effectively support students' conceptual understanding.