Co-constructing meaning and context in international teacher education

In teacher education, students not only construct content knowledge but examine theory through their own experiences to be able to apply it to practice in equitable education. Teacher education prepares students for a certain educational system and usually it is the one in which the students are themselves educated. International higher education programmes in countries where English is not an official language use English as a lingua franca (ELF) for teaching and learning. However, participants come to a communicative situation with their own history, past experiences, knowledge, and their own frames of reference. This article looks at an excerpt from a particular university teaching session in English-medium instruction (EMI) teacher education in Finland where a group of international students from diverse educational, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds negotiate for meaning and common understanding. A discussion about an ethical dilemma related to student assessment is analyzed qualitatively turn-by-turn to show how communicative resources help overcome mis-and non-understanding that stems from, besides linguistic difficulties, understanding contexts in different ways. The achievement of mutual intelligibility and individual learning required the participation of many to allow for the linguistic challenges of understanding less familiar varieties and uses of English, and interpret the cultural and contextual levels behind the utterances.