The future is plurilingual. Let's make teaching qualifications plurilingual too

Trinity's Ben Beaumont presented on 'The future is plurilingual. Let's make teaching qualifications plurilingual too' at the 5th Future of English Language Teaching Conference in October 2020. 

The increase in awareness of the potential damage done by English monolingual teaching practices in international contexts has led to many questioning the appropriacy of qualifications designed in the last century for the plurilingual present day, where code-switching and code-meshing are commonplace. This talk will identify some of these problems, along with issues relating to the certification of teachers’ CPD, and show how Trinity College London’s new qualification, the Certificate for Practising Teachers (CertPT) can attend to them.

By having overarching pedagogical outcomes rather than specific language teaching ones, the CertPT enables teachers and course providers to focus on local, contextualised needs. With options for plurilingual input and assessment, we will consider how the CertPT can help teachers develop the knowledge and skills necessary to become flexible and independent professionals in a multilingual teaching environment.