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ABSTRACT
The last few decades of foreign language education have been heavily impacted by the pedagogical approach of communicative language teaching and, on some level, influenced by insights from debates within inclusive education. Although the basic theoretical assumptions behind these two teaching philosophies to foster participation and communication within and among societies have by now been accepted as sensible, and are thus hardly ever questioned, their joint practical execution in educational settings is less than straightforward. While inclusive education postulates that teaching practice needs to accept a wide spectrum of learner profiles, communicative language teaching seem s to, at lea st to a degree, favour structured, reflective, autonomous, and open communicators. This article demonstrates how (preservice) EFL teachers approach such theoretical contradictions in their conceptualisations of teaching practice and, more specifically, in their evaluation of diverse learner personality traits, cognitive styles, preferences and potential deficits that can occur in language learning contexts. In this sense, the article investigates the extent to which foreign language teachers who are trained to teach communicatively resonate with the basic premise of inclusive education to accommodate all learners.
KEYWORDS
Inclusion, diversity, CLT, teacher education.
1. INTRODUCTION
From around 1970, the dominant view in the field of foreign language (FL) education has started to rest on the assumption that becoming proficient in an FL is equivalent to developing functional (intercultural) communicative competence, or the ability to participate actively in real -life communication. While this change in teaching perspective, which some have somewhat hastily likened to an actual paradigm shift (Jacobs & Farrell, 2003), did not seem to resemble a massively radical move comparable to the shift to the Direct Method a hundred years earlier, it gradually established a different core concern of language teaching. The focus emphasised the establishment of correct language habits through rehearsal and repetition in favour of their confident and purposeful use in the real world (Howatt & Smith, 2014). The new approach thus favoured the use of communicative and interactive activities in the classroom, such as "roleplays, improvisation, simulation and cooperative problem-solving or task-based work" (Howatt & Smith, 2014, p. 90). By extension, this implied that students who, for example, develop strategies to keep a conversation going, experiment with language freely, are able to vary their...