Greek Language Teacher Education for Teaching Greek as an Additional Language in Greek Secondary Schools

The aim of this paper is to reveal the pre-service and in-service preparation of Greek language teachers (GLTs) in terms of the teaching of Greek as an additional language
(GAL) in the multicultural environment of Greek secondary schools. The necessity of teaching GAL has recently appeared in the Greek educational system as increasing numbers of immigrant students have been appearing in Greek public schools for economic and political reasons during the last fifteen years. Therefore, GLTs, who are trained to teach Modern Greek language and literature to Greek language majority pupils in Secondary Education, are expected to teach GAL to Greek language learners (GLLs) in mainstream classrooms. In this paper, first, I stress the necessity of
adequate preparation of GLTs during their teacher education to teach GAL in the mainstream classroom. Second, I discuss the professional knowledge base that GLTs are expected to develop to teach GAL. The research aims to probe if Greek Language Schools in Greece and in-service programmes conducted during the programme ‘Inclusion of repatriate and immigrant children in secondary education (Gymnasium)’ (2006-2008) provided adequate training to GLTs to teach GAL. Hence,
I analyzed the curriculum content of the pre-service and in-service programmes adopting both quantitative and qualitative content analysis. Research findings stress the inefficient preparation of GLTs to teach GAL in the multicultural classroom.