This article examines the intercultural initiatives, programmes and strategy documents in New Zealand education to answer the following two questions: What intercultural policies and strategy documents are offered to New Zealand schools and teachers to accommodate their diverse communities? Which communities do they include and/or exclude? It explores and discusses paradigms, policies and curriculum developments that have been developed to address the growing levels of diversity in New Zealand’s schools and identifies some of the current significant gaps. This article argues that within the dominant Anglo-European framework, there are increasing intercultural initiatives supporting Māori and Pasifika communities within New Zealand schools but there are very limited policies and initiatives addressing the wider diverse communities. I argue that policies and initiatives should be all-encompassing, comprehensive and inclusive; that is, they must fairly encompass
all
members of the society and not be limited solely to specific groups. Moreover, the current policy statements are implemented in an ad hoc manner i.e. they are not supported through the systematic resource banks, leadership, teacher education and training and enabling strategies required to create societies that are more inclusive, with respectful intercultural relations. This article will be of interest to policy makers at a national level, those who work in schools and centres, and teacher educators who have a concern for the inclusion of ethnocultural minorities and intercultural education.
Improving the field of foreign language teaching without improving the qualities of the teachers seems impossible. This attempt, at first hand, requires recognizing the qualities of effective EFL teachers. The aim of this study was to find what foreign language instructors perceive to be the most important characteristics of a successful EFL teacher. In addition, the teachers' perception was compared to that of learners' to see whether there were discrepancies between the two groups' perceptions regarding the preferable characteristics of an effective English language instructors or not. A 58-item questionnaire was administered to teachers at a prominent language institute in Iran. This questionnaire was divided into eight sections and addressed issues relating to teachers' personal qualities, command in English, teaching methods and evaluation methods they used within the class, mastery over teaching, teacher-student relation, class management and finally language skills management. Teachers were asked to specify the importance of each item in the questionnaire using terms like not important at all, somehow important, important and finally very important. Basic statistics were used to convert the qualitative results into quantitative ones for easier comparison. Interestingly however, the study revealed that the students' perceptions and teachers' perceptions do not differ in major ways although there are slight discrepancies.
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