Saudi Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences (SJHSS)
Volume-3 | Issue-01 | 79-81
Review Article
Preparing Foreign Language Teachers for Multilingual Classrooms: From a Didactic to a Social Role
Ahmed Mehdaoui
Published : Jan. 30, 2018
Abstract
In the light on the new recent mobility - driven by ongoing and forced
migration, resulting from political instability, and economic and social problems,
many social efforts have been made in order to integrate these new arrivals and
therefore ensure a social cohesion. Educationally, many conferences and seminars
were held in order to help teachers promote a good learning atmosphere among the
new arrival of learners who bring multiple languages and mobile experiences into
the classroom. As far as language teaching is concerned, language teachers have
been given a noble and a social, but huge, responsibility to help solving social
problems. However, the question that may impose itself today is that do foreign
language teachers take sufficient training programmes to meet the new needs and
fulfill such roles? What teaching training programmes are being undertaken by
foreign language teachers? It is argued that teachers’ roles have always been
didactical – instructor, facilitator, integrator, designer, etc. However, based on the
new responsibilities assigned to language teachers, their teaching training
programmes should be reconsidered. Our main goal in this work is to stress the
need for practical teaching training that suits the multilingual classrooms, in which
the foreign language teacher does not act only as an instructor, but also as a social
assistant whose responsibility is to help solving the social problems.