Teachers and teacher educators: Education and professional development for early language learning

Description

Educational settings in the 21st century are increasingly multilingual spaces, where learners may speak (an)other language(s) at home or in the community, where foreign languages (usually English) are introduced at ever earlier ages, and where another language might be a medium of instruction. Research into teacher education and professional development remains an emerging field when taking into consideration early childhood and the earlier years of formal education (i.e. 3 to 12 years old).

It is recognized that formal, institutional-led teacher preparation and continued professional development is central to teacher quality and thus learner outcomes. Educating children with a view to developing and maintaining multilingualism in a variety of contexts requires skilled professionals – teachers and teacher educators – with distinct teaching repertoires and specific pedagogical content knowledge. The purpose of this conference is to focus on the education and professional development of teachers and teacher educators to foster multilingual spaces in the early years of formal education and to provide a platform to further cement the relevance of learning from and with different contexts.

In collaboration with the AILA Early Language Learning Research Network (ELLReN) and the Primary English Education in Portugal (PEEP) network, the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities (FCSH) at Nova University Lisbon extends an invitation to teachers, teacher educators, researchers and colleagues actively involved in or investigating the field of teacher education and teacher professional development in early language learning to promote multilingual spaces in schools. These early language learning contexts include:
• instructed language learning (i.e. English as a foreign language, modern foreign languages and CLIL);
• heritage, minority and second language learning;
• immersion and bilingual education.

Period	12 Nov 2020 → 14 Nov 2020
Event type	Conference
Conference number	AILA ELL ReN 4
Location	Lisbon, Portugal
Degree of Recognition	International