How teachers’ attitudes affect their approaches to teaching international students

Abstract

There is empirical evidence that teachers’ intentions concerning what students should learn, teachers’ beliefs about teaching and teachers’ conceptions of, and approaches to, teaching within a specific context are closely related to the resulting quality of teaching. Following this line of reasoning, I argue in this paper that despite extensive research about good practice teaching international students, it is still unclear what constitutes good practice within this specific context. This research uses empirical data to determine how teachers may improve their understanding of, and adapt their teaching to, diverse groups of international students to meet emergent demands. A sample of 20 academics teaching international students in a medium‐sized regional Australian university participated in the study by responding to the widely used Approaches to Teaching Inventory. Results show that in this sample teachers tend to adapt their teaching approaches to match the context and, to some extent, slightly tend towards a knowledge transmission, teacher‐focused approach to teaching. An understanding of this may be used to implement staff development programmes for teaching practices that promote a student‐focused approach to teaching to encourage knowledge creation and conceptual change when teaching international students.