Abstract

Language teachers are key figures in preparing young people for participation in an increasingly multilingual and culturally diverse world, yet little is known about how they go about this in practice. This book uses examples of classroom interaction to reveal how teachers of languages act as intercultural mediators and the implications of this for practice. To date, there has been little exploration of how teachers mediate language and culture learning from an intercultural perspective, and what underlies their mediation practices in terms of their conceptions of intercultural language teaching and learning. This book offers an account of what teachers are thinking, feeling and doing as they enact an intercultural perspective on language teaching and learning.

Michelle Kohler is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Research Centre for Languages and Cultures at the University of South Australia, and Lecturer in Languages Education and Indonesian language at Flinders University. Her research interests are mediation, particularly in relation to intercultural language teaching and learning, languages pedagogy, curriculum and assessment, and Indonesian language education.

This interesting, well-written and important volume takes readers into the promising and exciting domain of intercultural communication in which speakers are not just representing, but enacting, different cultures in discourse. Michelle Kohler's highly readable and theoretically well-grounded contribution to this emerging field of specialisation is a tribute to her but it also distils a now well established Australian tradition of intercultural theorising that is attracting worldwide interest.

This timely and engaging book makes a significant contribution to our knowledge about language teaching. It provides a detailed and thoughtful examination of teachers' practice in language classrooms that opens up new insights into how teachers work with complex ideas of language and culture and mediate these for their learners. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the intercultural in language education.

Little work has been done to understand how the concept of mediation works in practice. This book addresses this gap. It provides a rich account of the way in which three teachers seek to mediate language learning, with their students in the day-to-day lived experience of teaching and learning as they themselves come to terms with an intercultural orientation to language learning. The value of this book resides in the sensitive understanding of the reality of classroom language teaching and learning and its demonstration of how, in language learning, people matter.