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Plurilingual Pedagogies in Language Teacher Education: Rethinking TESL/TESOL Programs

With the emergence of a plurilingual paradigm shift in language teaching, questions concerning the extent to which language teacher education programs are effectively preparing language teachers to teach in our messy, heteroglossic, and multilingual world (Pavlenko, 2005) have assumed new and vital significance in the training and education of teachers. Every year, thousands of new English language teachers become qualified to teach in everincreasingly culturally and linguistically diverse landscapes. However, despite the considerable number of TESL/TESOL certificate and diploma courses qualifying such teachers around the world, little is known about how these programs have adapted their pedagogy to meet the current reality of a plurilingual paradigm shift in language teaching. In this session, the underlying assumptions and theoretical underpinnings of monolingual and plurilingual approaches to language teaching will be analyzed. Insights gained from a research study investigating whether traditional views of language learning and teaching constituted the foundation of a TESL Canada Certificate course in Ontario, Canada, will also be shared.