SVETIMŲJŲ KALBŲ STUDIJOS / STUDIES OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES Two Heads Are Better Than One: Team Teaching in TESOL Internship

This article aims to critically look at team teaching approach that is currently used in UWS TESOL internship program and the role it plays in achieving teaching and learning effectiveness and outcomes. Specifically, using ethnography approach, this project examines benefits this innovative student-centred approach brings to teacher mentors, student teachers and students, and further discusses various potential issues that may emerge. Both supervising teachers and student teachers who undertake their practicum at various English language centres work as a team cooperatively (e.g. researching curriculum resources, designing classroom activities, preparing lesson plans), communicate on a regularly basis and in various ways (e.g. face-to-face and via emails), and reflect on their teaching experience (e.g. both strengths and weaknesses). Both parties comment that team teaching approach encourages individual input and team communication as well as collaboration, promotes flexible use of teaching methods, develops critical thinking skills, contributes to quality teaching and accommodative learning, and maximises student learning experience as indicated in our operations of TESOL internship program for years. Student feedback is also positive in that their individual learning needs are met and supported. Meanwhile, the author also notes some emerging issues and challenges (e.g. student teachers’ knowledge gaps in grammar, time management and intercultural communicative competence issue) in the current internship practice. Finally, team teaching approach is pedagogically discussed and recommendations are made to address the emerging issues for future improvements.


Introduction 1
Traditionally classroom teaching has been characterised by a group of students taught by one teacher only. He/she takes sole responsibility for teaching processes, including curriculum studies, material selection, lesson preparation, sequencing, class management, evaluation (Brown, 2007;Harmer, 2007). Such teaching preference has been so dominant that team teaching has been little used. However, it is claimed that team teaching approach (Gaytan, 2010) can not only benefit teachers but also better student learning experience (Anderson & Speck, 1998) because it allows for two student teachers to work together, communicate with each other and provide assistance and feedback in addition to supervision by an experienced and qualified teacher mentor so that both student teachers learn on the job and achieve their objectives of learning to teach through teaching practice in a real classroom setting. This is what van Amelsvoort, van Wijk and den Ouden (2010) term as interactive team teaching. It is through team interaction and team collaboration that every individual gives their input and better teaching methodology and effective learning support can be planned and applied.
In the following, the author will first briefly describe TESOL internship program offered in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts (SHCA) at the University of Western Sydney (UWS) (http://www.uws. edu.au), then review the important role team teaching plays in our program, and finally look at the prospect of team teaching to be used in UWS TESOL internship and potential issues that need to be addressed in order for both student teachers and students to gain most out of it.

Team Teaching: A Literature Review
Team teaching involves a group of instructors working purposefully, regularly, and cooperatively to help a group of students learn (Buckley, 2000, p. 4).
Such a group of instructors may be those who have been working as qualified teachers for years and they can also be student teachers in training or pre-service teachers, e.g. UWS TESOL student teachers undertaking internship at selected English language centres in Sydney. To find whether interdisciplinary team teaching is effective, Sandholtz (2000) studies data collected using a few different methods (e.g. questionnaires, interviews, observations, and group discussions) and claims that there are four approaches, such as "students teacher pairs", "student teachers team with advisors", "open configurations" and "Interdisciplinary triads" (pp. [42][43][44][45][46][47][48]. These teaching approaches prove effective in that they encourage staff members to work collaboratively, try innovative teaching methods, learn from each other and undertake critical analysis and reflections.
In this paper, the author will focus on team teaching with reference to cooperative partnership between a qualified teacher mentor and two student teachers as one team working together in their TESOL internship. Such collaboration results in a number of benefits (Dyrud, 2010a(Dyrud, , 2010b, allows teacher mentors and student teachers to work cooperatively, discover issues, discuss and work out solutions, through which the latter learn and improve their teaching and professional skills, thus best serving different learning needs of their students. Apparently this process not only benefits qualified teachers and student teachers professionally but also maximises student learning experience.

An Innovative Channel of Professional Development
Cooperative partnership between teacher mentors and student teachers in the real teaching context creates the possibility for both parties undertake and enhance their professional development in an innovative manner. This benefit can be looked at from two perspectives. First, team teaching as a form of cooperative partnership urges the teacher mentors to broadly explore areas relevant to pedagogy, psychology and effective language teaching methodologies in particular, and keep abreast of recent developments related to their teaching profession. Second, it enables the student teachers to establish close links with qualified and experienced teacher mentors, seek advice and feedback on various aspects of teaching practices, and improve their communication and interpersonal skills when engaged in interaction, even with those abroad (Tomaš, Farrelly, & Haslam, 2008) as education and language teaching context may vary from country to country.
Furthermore, team teaching provides student teachers with an opportunity to seek challenges and increase their subject knowledge and flexibly apply language teaching methods to specific classroom contexts and student groups, thus to encourage them to become more innovative and creative (Perry & Stewart, 2005). Such collaboration can also be established between native English teachers (NET) and non-native English teachers (NNET), and in their collaborative work, each party not only finds team teaching approach rewarding and fascinating (Carless & Walker, 2006), but also review, reflect and revise the approach, thus adding new ideas and points to it. As the partnership progresses, they each have a chance to engage with reflexivity that enables them to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses and take actions for better performance (Edge, 2011). The former can be shared with their colleagues and modelled across the groups while the latter can be examined to find solutions. Ultimately, team teaching helps all parties grow professionally, making further collaboration and innovation possible.

Better Student Learning Experience
Apart from the fact both teacher mentors and student teachers benefit from team teaching collaboration, students themselves also find they have better learning experience contributed by teachers with different expertise and teaching techniques. It is also noted that students' individual learning needs can be better accommodated even though they have individual variations in learning style, language levels and intrinsic motivation (Harmer, 2007). For example, some students are used to teachercentred approach and they tend to listen more and talk less while others prefer student-centred method and they are ready to participate in classroom activities, interacting with their teacher and fellow students as well. In addition, the former group of students are afraid of making errors and are more unlikely to be critical of published theories whereas the latter group of students are most often proactive and are more likely to engage in critical analysis of their readings. Apparently there are a mix of students with different abilities and characteristics.
However, with the assistance of teachers equipped with team teaching strategies, the students in a mixed-ability class, particularly from different cultural background, are in a better position to learn more effectively and comfortably from both NETs and NNETs with the case in Asian countries as a good example (Carless, 2006).
While both NETs and NNETs work as a team to facilitate students in their macro language skills learning, those that speak a second language play an important role in helping beginners or slow-paced students by using their native language. It is argued that using a native language when necessary in an English class can help those in need to learn better and make progress (Sarıçoban, 2010;Scott & DE LA Fuente, 2008).
However, it should be kept in mind, the purpose of using a native language in an English class is to assist students in learning a target language, English, which is to be used at all times whenever possible.

UWS TESOL Internship Program
TESOL Internship is an important professional unit offered by UWS to students who study Postgraduate Diploma in TESOL and Master of Arts in TESOL 2 . As it is stated in the unit outline and learning guide, TESOL internship is a professional practice unit which consists of an internship in an English language teaching organisation for students of TESOL. It involves participation in the various aspects of the work of the teaching organisation, including a supervised English language teaching practice component for local students. Assessment items facilitate student teachers' self-reflection on their teaching practice and critical evaluation of teaching methods and needs assessment in practice (TESOL Internship, 2012, p. 2).
To complete this unit successfully, TESOL students need to undertake three internship activities, including class observation, service learning and supervised teaching, with a total of fifty hours in an accredited English language centre in addition to satisfactory completion of two written assignments of 4,500 words in total 3 .
In the past few years, more than 100 UWS TESOL students have undertaken their internship and completed the three phases at UWSCollege's Westmead Campus (http://www.uwscollege.edu.au) and Liverpool Centre 4 located in western Sydney. The former offers, among other programs, recognised English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) programs or English for academic purposes (EAP) of different levels to full-fee international students who prepare to further their education at an Australian university (Glew, 2010) while the latter provided English language skills courses (e.g. Certificates in Spoken and Written English) to newly arrived legal and eligible migrants and refugees to assist them in gaining everyday functional communication skills (Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP)).
UWS TESOL student teachers are provided a placement at both venues to observe qualified and experienced TESOL teacher mentors for 20 hours. They also undertake another 20 hours of service learning which typically includes undertaking studies in curriculum materials and preparing lesson plans, supervising students during student trips, assisting individual students with their specific learning needs and attending staff meetings and workplace training. Finally they teach classes of various languages levels and mixed abilities, supervised by a qualified and experienced teacher mentor.

Participants
The student teachers start doing their TESOL internship after they have completed all fundamental units, such as English Linguistics for TESOL, TESOL Methodology and Curricula, and Second Language Assessment and Testing. Their age ranges from around twenty to fifty. Some are inservice teachers, while others are pre-service ones who are excited about their first-time teaching experience. Though they all have had a bachelor degree before entry into the current postgraduate program, they major in different disciplines such as English literature, education and sciences. Most of them work part-time or on a casual basis whereas some have full-time job. What is special about our TESOL student teachers is that they come from a wide range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds, from as many as twenty-five countries. Such a cultural diversity provides an opportunity for these student teachers to engage in intercultural communication and develop understanding of diverse cultural values, conventions and interactional styles, thus sharpening their sensitivity to different cultural practices (DePalma, Santos Rego, & Moledo, 2006) and learning to acknowledging and negotiating language and cultural differences. They have come to view these differences positively.

Information Source and Methodology
Using the ethnography (Watson-Gegeo, 1988) as a research approach to observing, seeing and understanding ESL classroom procedures, techniques and practices as well as associated activities, the author will offer an "insider's" point of view and his personal experience working with his student teachers in various English language colleges and education centres in the Greater Western Sydney. The ethnographic method allows the author to draw empirical data and authentic information from a variety of sources including author's participant observation and site visits, student internship logs (Crookes, 2003), reports, supervising teachers' feedback, email communication with students, workshop discussions and seminars.
To prepare their final internship reports, all students have been advised to keep their observation logs which are used to record what they observe in practicum activities (Crookes, 2003), reflect on their participation in student excursion, staff meetings, curriculum development and inclass teaching practices (Chitpin, Simon, & Galipeau, 2008). Furthermore, it allows the author to undertake an inside analysis and exploration of the student teachers' practicum experiences with reference to his own on-site observation and communication, and a deeper understanding and true account of their personal reflections and teaching practices begin to emerge. This is significant as it does not from an outsider's or non-participant's view of points or from imagination, but from a social constructivist theory (Beck & Kosnik, 2006), building on a true-to-picture description and analysis of what happens in a particular social setting without imposing one's personal point of view on it.
In this study, the author will base on his account and analysis on what happens and what UWS TESOL student teachers experience during their practicum in various English language colleges and education centres. The broad phases, as mentioned above, include class observation, service learning and supervised teaching. These practicum activities help student teachers engage in further professional development by working cooperatively with their peers and experienced teachers as well, communicating with them and getting feedback, and this contributes to building and maintaining collaborative professional relationship (Ferrier-Kerr, 2009).
In the next section, the author will describe UWS internship phases in conjunction with student teachers' reflections and critical analysis of their internship experiences.

Team Teaching in UWS Internship
The author first gives an account of the perspectives in which team teaching approach is employed to nourish UWS student teachers' professional growth and maximise students learning experience and outcomes. Focus will be laid on three TESOL internship phases including class observation, service learning and supervised teaching in a collaborative team setting.

Group Class Observation and Discussion
Group class observation refers to the activities in which a few student teachers sit at the back or on the side of a language classroom watching an experienced and qualified teacher mentor guiding and interacting with a group of students in their teaching English as a second language (ESL) activities. Before each observation session, each pair of students make full observation preparations by working out their observation plan and make relevant preparations, including an observation diary, observation focus and preliminary knowledge about the student group to be observed. While engaged in observation, the student teachers note down some important points in their diary and log they have planned to observe (Wajnryb, 1992). For example, some of them choose to focus on observing teaching methods, teacher talk time (TTT), student talk time (STT) and classroom management with 15-minute time slot for each observation point in a 60-minute session, and then another four different foci in the next session. They have been advised to examine an observation plan template which shows essential information and details, and includes broad headings (see Appendix 1).
They have also been encouraged to design and develop their own observation plan in their log book, and this will make it handy to put down what they observe for each focus, using symbols, abbreviations and self-created codes (Crookes, 2003). The student teachers observe what they each are interested in and meet later to reflect on their observation after class. This is particularly helpful for the team members to review their observation experience by listening to each other, making critical comments and telling their own thoughts and giving inputs which may be different from others'. It is through such team interaction that every member is engaged in participation, thinking and learning and this process helps them grow professionally and interpersonally.
As can be seen that one of the advantages of team observation is that the student teachers can work cooperatively as a team and engage themselves in group discussion of their observations as they have common purpose (Crookes, 2003). Take observation of teaching methods for example, students teachers understand that one commonly used method is communicative language teaching (CLT), which focuses on language fluency (Brown, 2007;Harmer, 2007) and encourages learners to use meaningful communication relevant to their real life. In their group discussion of class observation and lesson planning, some students propose that CLT is best applied to intermediate and advanced language learners, such as those taking English for academic purpose (EAP) level IV and V offered at UWSCollege as they focus on their macro language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing, particularly the latter two).
Although CLT emphasizes fluent communication skills, it does not abandon accuracy but encourages learners to practise grammatical forms in a meaningful communication context. The student teachers recommend that students work in pairs and be facilitated to detect grammatical errors and correct them, when necessary getting hints rather than answers from their teacher. And it does not stop there. Students are asked to explain how they approach the error and why it is corrected their way and this gives an opportunity to students to demonstrate their ability to explain and support their arguments, build their confidence and skills in public speaking and communication. However, the student teachers claim it may be productive for teachers not to over-use CLT in teaching beginners as they do not have sufficient language knowledge and communication skills, and appropriate use of CLT for such a group may motivate them to learn at their own pace and build their self-confidence and interest in adapting to CLT as they go.
While engaged in team discussion, the student teachers also evaluate the role of grammar translation method (GTM). Their knowledge and skills and readiness to facilitate students of different levels and those who need learning assistance can be seen in the following summary of their team discussion and evaluation of GMT. Whereas it has been largely ignored due to its obvious weaknesses, it is worth mentioning that GMT plays a special role in teaching specific professional skills, e.g. English-LOTE (language other than English) translation 5 . As there are ambiguities in most languages (Dussias, 2003), GTM can help learners understand and translate it into another language accurately through analysing the grammatical structure of an English sentence, discussing the syntactic differences.
For example, let's look at "Growing plants can be interesting", which is free from a specific context, may be syntactically ambiguous and can be interpreted differently. First, it is interpreted as "it is interesting to grow plants". When gerundial phrase "growing plants" is taken as a subject, the present participle "growing" is used as a preattribute modifying "plants". Second, it may also be interpreted as "plants that (are) grow(ing) can be interesting", where "plants" is a subject with the present participle "growing" used as a pre-attribute modifying "plants". Apparently the ambiguity lies in "growing plants", but analysis of its grammatical structure gives learners a better idea of the two ambiguous meanings it has.
Thus, it is important to remember that such grammatical analysis is not conducted for the purpose of knowing its structure only, but with the aim to understand its meanings. As a matter of fact, GTM helps beginners develop their target language skills and build their confidence through the use of L1 (Copland & Neokleous, 2011;Storch & Wigglesworth, 2003), and it paves the way for them to progress toward the next stage of upgrading their communicative competence when CLT is more often employed by their teacher.
However, it is important to bear in mind that using L2 is the ultimate goal while using L1 is a means through which to achieve it.
When group discussion occurs, it gives every group member a chance to think deeply and critically of the advantages and disadvantages of a teaching method. So it is the same case with group discussion of any other focus they have observed. Analysis and understanding of their observation enable the student teachers to take their discussion and reflection into consideration when they plan lessons and develop teaching resources with a purpose. Consequently such good preparations are more likely to provide the students a good opportunity to learn better and more effectively.

Team Service Learning and Intercultural Communication
Service learning refers to curriculum-relevant activities, including designing curriculum resources, undertaking professional development, tutoring small group, etc. While student teachers participate in these teaching-relevant activities, they can experience procedures and processes and reflect on how each activity is organised, approached and dealt with to the effect that it works smoothly to keep classroom teaching in good shape. For instance, before they step into the classroom and teach a group of students, normally from a diverse cultural backgrounds, the student teachers spend hours examining curriculum, studying course materials such as textbooks available, developing additional learning resources, including exercises, familiarising themselves with student profiles, working on teaching plan, and checking teaching equipment, etc. With so many tasks to complete prior to teaching itself, student teachers find it more helpful to work together, with one member picking things up before the other tends to forget them. Additionally, they can divide up what needs to be done and find it more effective and easier to manage the challenges, similar to "student pair/group work" (Hiep, 2007, p. 199). What is more interesting and enjoyable is that both can actually talk through things that need to be done and two heads may work and think more smartly and deeply, and develop positive working relationship.
Service learning also includes extra-curriculum activities such as attending staff meetings, chairing spelling competition and supervising student excursion, etc. These activities provide student teachers with an opportunity to meet with colleagues (e.g. academic and general staff members), discuss issues and concerns and make suggestions. For example, there was a heated discussion about an Australian tourism TV commercial promotion "Where the bloody hell are you?" (http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Y-ZLr9ePuj8) which was designed and promoted worldwide to attract more overseas visitors to Australia. After viewing the youtube video a few times, student teachers look at two sides of a coin and think intercultural communication issues should be noted. On the one hand, there is an intercultural communication issue caused by the wording "the bloody hell". The use of such wording is culturally inappropriate to many Asian cultures such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean although it is linguistically and socially acceptable in Australian context. On the other hand, Chinese, Japanese and Korean speakers who find it offensive may need to emerge in Australian context and experience Australian way of live, thus coming to understand Australian speakers are characteristic of mateship, laid-back style of life and fair-go, and this is the way they speak in their everyday life. The word "blood" is an Australian cultural script (Wierzbicka, 2002) and is the mildest of expletives without any intension to offend tourists from cultural background (Lee, 2010). However, beer-drinking in the ad is an issue that needs attention (Smith, 2006) as it is even banned in the prime TV time in Canada and the US. The point of this team work is that all team members participate in the group discussion, critically analyse the topic contents, share their own view with others and they are more likely to achieve effective intercultural understanding of current issues and enhance their intercultural communication competence and intercultural sensitivity (Yang, 2011a(Yang, , 2011b. Other team activities that can develop cooperative working relationship, interpersonal network and intercultural communication skills include assisting the teacher mentor in supervising a student trip to the Manly Beach, a beautiful beach not far from Sydney or to the Blue Mountain, which is some distance in western Sydney.

Supervised Team Teaching as Collaborative Learning Experience
Supervised teaching refers to teaching activities undertaken in a classroom supervised by a qualified and experienced teacher mentor at an accredited English college or education centre. Different from small group tutoring which involves teaching a smaller group (e.g. coaching a few students in an independent learning centre), supervised teaching normally enlists a larger group of students who are of different age groups, varied language levels and diverse cultural backgrounds. Such a typical example can be found in Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) offered at UWSCollege Liverpool Centre or Navitas English colleges in western Sydney.
However, such a challenging classroom composition can be better managed by two student teachers who can assist each other, use their own skills and implement their teaching plan. To ensure that TTT is minimised and STT is maximised, they can have students split into a few small groups for a round-table discussion. After a student teacher facilitates a group by asking students questions, encouraging every group member to talk, adding to what is being discussed and inviting comments, he/she moves on to assist the next group. Apart from "interactive teaching", two diverse forms of team teaching "parallel teaching" and "rotational teaching" (van Amelsvoort, et al., 2010, pp. 98-99) can help the student teachers achieve desired teaching and learning outcomes.
At the same time, the student teachers assist the students who need additional learning advice, and to provide individual learning support needed. Understanding that the students have different prior learning experience and ESL learning styles in learning, they make efforts to recognize, analyze and accommodate individual learner's needs (Westwood & Arnold, 2004). It is understood that some tend to be auditory learners who learn better through hearing information while other are likely to be visual learners who learn more effectively through seeing information (Wintergerst, DeCapua, & Ann Verna, 2003). To meet their different learning needs, the student teachers work together, designing and developing learning activities for auditory learners. For example, they use audio materials, story-telling and pair/group talk and individual student presentation to encourage meaningful oral communication and interpersonal interaction. For the visual learners, the student teachers write the key words and sometimes draw pictures and graphs/tables to help convey information, in addition to using authentic materials from newspapers and magazines.
To meet the need of students who prefer learning through doing things, the student teachers use role play, getting students to play their preferred role in a situational learning activity. For instance, some students play the role of customers and other take the role of shop assistants in the Woolworths, a super-market in Sydney. The former ask for information about exotic fruits like mangosteens and rambutans and the latter use realia to show the customers what they are like and invite them to taste the fruits. The customers are happy, saying they taste like lychee, then realia is used again in the role play. This makes it possible for learners to learn new words associated with image, colour, shape, and taste, and retain the long-term memory because of situational role and interaction.
Such accommodative activity-based teaching and learning approach sees the students become more interested and engaged in learning tasks and make more apparent progress in participatory learning through meaningful communication and learner autonomy (Harmer, 2007). It helps the learners learn with motivation and interest and more effectively when they are methodologically guided and made aware of their potential to learn and succeed if they are willing to communicate.
Both student teachers take turn playing multiple roles in class, a learner teacher, a facilitator and an observer. Not only does a student teacher learn through practising teaching itself and assisting his/her partner, but also can gain constructive feedback from a variety of sources (Brown & Danaher, 2008).
First comes the feedback from the supervising teacher, who observes and takes note at the back of the room. His/her feedback is given to the student teachers both before class and after class. Before they team teach, the student teacher are required to send their team lesson plans to the supervising teacher for comments which are provided for them to consider and revise if necessary.
His/her template comments (see Appendix 2) are also communicated to them after each teaching session so that they can know what has been done well and what needs further thinking and improving. The student teachers study the feedback where the two can again work cooperatively on issues in particular and this can only help them to put TESOL theories into practice, but also gain practical and in-context teaching experience to improve their team teaching in the next session.
Another source of feedback comes from the students who approach their student teachers for questions they do not quite understand in class or tell their learning troubles of different kind such as low volume, fast speech, insufficient explanation of grammar points and lack of handwriting on the whiteboard, etc. Based on the student feedback, the student teachers once again work as a team, practise micro teaching with two members team teaching and the rest playing the role of their students. While doing so, they pay special attention to the identified issues, checking and ensure everyone in the room can hear and stop to get student feedback on whether they follow the teacher so far and encourage them to ask questions whenever they have any.
The student teachers have also spent time practising their handwriting in their notebook, handwrite the key words and concepts and draw pictures and tables to illustrate the points on the whiteboard. Their students are happy that they can read without any difficulty and more importantly their teachers' handwritten contents help them concentrate on the lesson and enable them to follow the points and learn more effectively (Medwell & Wray, 2008). As a result, the student teachers work cooperatively, in a team teaching environment, with their supervising teacher and students, by doing their best to prepare their lessons, keeping students' learning needs in mind and getting most out of each teaching session.

Issues and Solutions
In their team teaching practice in various English language college and education centres, some issues are identified and solutions are recommended to have the emerging issues addressed as part of professional development in their future career. These issues can be classified into such three kinds as grammatical knowledge, time management, and intercultural communication competence. First, the students the student teachers teach in the workplace come from non-English-speaking background and some of them make many grammatical errors in writing and thus have many questions about grammar.
However, some of the student teachers find it challenging to explain grammatical points clearly though they can write the sentence correctly and others have gaps in their own grammar knowledge (Dickins & Woods, 1988). Team teaching members work together on these issues identified and they each read relevant section of grammar books (e.g. the use of indefinite articles "a" and "an") and then do a number of relevant grammar exercises, including error detection, correction and explanation. With reference to the argument made by Dickins and Woods (1988), the student teachers also practise grammar in a meaningful and communicative context by reading English newspapers such as The Sydney Morning Herald or The Daily Telegraph and explaining grammatical points that used to be challenging, thus becoming able and confident in teaching grammar in class.
Second, team teaching members find it challenging in managing time commitment to participation and group discussion on a regular basis. The main is that most student teachers, international or local, have casual or part-time employment and others have additional family commitments or career responsibility. To find a solution to this issue, team member agree that a planning strategy should be put in place (Ho, 2003). This requires that every team teaching member work out their own schedules and communicate with their teammates, put a meeting reminder in their computer calendar which can create an alert message while they use the computer. They also find it less stressful when they have a few backup days when they can make themselves available for a team meeting or discussion if their original schedule has to change because of the unexpected commitments. Meanwhile all team members are advised on the differences between "monochronic and polychronic time cultures with regard to time management" (Nonis, Teng, & Ford, 2005, p. 409) and intercultural miscommunication is least likely to occur.
Third, the student teachers find that they have room to improve in intercultural communication competence, which is important and can help them work effectively with colleagues and students from diverse language and cultural backgrounds. This is particularly the case where misunderstanding may occur when people from an individualistic culture interact with those from a collectivistic culture due to various cultural differences, such as self-orientation vs. other-orientation, directness vs. indirectness, preference for verbal communication vs. preference for nonverbal communication etc. (Gudykunst, 2003).
Intercultural communication competence includes two major elements: cross-linguistic competence and sociocultural competence. They work together to help bring about successful communication and understanding in an intercultural setting. In this case, appropriate intercultural communication training sessions should be purposely designed for the student teachers so that they become aware of various linguistic and cultural differences and are able to manage intercultural communication. It helps many people in various ways when the student teachers see intercultural differences positively and are willing to take on new challenges in their teaching career.

Conclusion
The above discussion intends to highlight the student teachers undertake class observation and engage in various service learning activities in order to prepare for their supervised team teaching in accredited English language colleges and education centres. It is argued that interactionand-communication-based team teaching is more likely for the team members to bring into full use of their skills and expertise, making classroom teaching more lively and interesting, and improving their teaching performance and student learning outcomes. This experience is professionally and interpersonally rewarding as they work cooperatively to do their job and develop working relationships with culture-diverse colleagues and students.
However, the student teachers need to take precaution in their team teaching as it takes time for them come to consensus and cooperation (Conn, 2010). As some of the student teachers have never worked in the Australian education sector before, they may not expect the unexpected. When they encounter unexpected difficulties, they should communicate with their teammates, thinking actively and work out solutions together, and they are able to build up their capacity to do so as they go. It is this exciting practicum period that can add to their professional growth and maturity, enables them to discover the unknown and create new ideas.
Even though team teaching proves to be an effective and innovative teaching and learning approach, it has also brought forward at least three issues such as insufficient grammar knowledge and lack of confidence to explain grammatical points, time management challenge and issue in intercultural communication competence. Solutions have been proposed to address these issues. The problemsolving process itself has been such a rewarding experience that will fully prepare the student teachers and get them ready to pursue their future teaching career either in Australia or overseas. įgūdžius, prisideda prie aukštos mokymo ir mokymosi kokybės ir didina studento mokymosi patirtį. Tai atsispindi TESOL programoje. Besimokančiųjų atsiliepimai yra teigiami, nes taip tenkinami jų mokymosi poreikiai. Autorius taip pat atkreipia dėmesį į dabartinėje praktikoje naujai iškylančias problemas ir iššūkius (pvz., mokytojų ir dėstytojų gramatikos žinių spragas, laiko organizavimą ir tarpkultūrinės komunikacijos kompetencijos problemas). Aptariamas komandinis mokymo metodas, teikiamos rekomendacijos, kaip spręsti problemas ir tobulinti mokymo procesą.