Extended telecollaboration practice in teacher education towards pluricultural and plurilingual proficiency

This article presents an extended telecollaboration practice, hereafter ETP, which has taken place since 2015 between pre-service teachers of English as an International Language (EIL), studying in their respective institutions in Israel and Germany. Both partners in this collaboration come from countries where the need for a culturally relevant pedagogy is acutely felt as linguistic and ethnic diversity are a daily challenge for school teachers. This study explored the effects of ETP on the participants' sense of preparedness for teaching EIL to linguistically and culturally diverse, prospective pupil populations. The mixed methods study comprised three data sets: one quantitative and two qualitative were collected from 100 participants: Israelis (N52) and Germans (N48). Participants were evaluated pre and post course by means of a Likert-type scale self-report questionnaire. T-tests revealed a significant difference in only one aspect of the questionnaire. Similarly, conflicting evidence emerged from the qualitative data sets indicating that participants tended to overrate their competences. Findings revealed that only half of the participants were able to apply their perceived expertise to material and task design for prospective pupil populations. Implications drawn from the findings are discussed.