6.2.1.1.1 The Interview Study (Study 1). Based on the tutors’ answers, it seems that they deal with a large variety of global and intercultural topics in their lessons, even though, in most cases, they do not deliberately bring the topics into their classes: either the students bring them up (by selecting their topics for discussion or by giving presentations on them) or they appear in the materials they bring into class with a language development aim. Except for the state of education in Hungary, the participants tend not to discuss any local issues with their groups: The reason for steering away from these issues was not explained by the respondents, but it might be for the same reason why the tutors are also more cautious when a current controversial local issue comes up: they are afraid of the political overtones (Hunyadi & Wessenauer, 2016) and they do not want to be accused of pushing a certain political agenda.

6.2.1.1.2 The Questionnaire Study (Study 4). The participants of the questionnaire study were asked to rate how likely they would be to bring certain global, local, and intercultural issues into their classes. Based on the results presented in 4.2.2.1, Table 6.1 shows the three topics from each category the tutors are most likely to deal with and the three topics they are most unlikely to deal with in their classes. As can be seen from Table 6.1, the participants are most likely to deal with the following global issues: climate change, health, and youth. Even though they were not asked about their reasons for doing so, these answers were corroborated by the interview study, and the participants mentioned these topics because of their timeliness and relevance in their students’ lives. Regarding the local issues, it is apparent that they mostly deal with issues that concern the youth (education, emigration, and unemployment), thus relevance may also play an important role in their topic choice. The answers regarding the intercultural issues they bring into the class were also confirmed by the interview study and given the nature of the programme in which they teach, it is not surprising that tutors involved in EFL teacher training deal with cultural differences, stereotypes, and intercultural communication in their classes. This is also shown by the fact that the means in this category, even in the second row, were relatively high. Concerning the means, it may be interesting to observe that the highest means in the category of local issues do not reach the ones in the other two categories, thus this category seems to be less favoured by the teacher trainers (which has also been confirmed in the interviews).

 

 

There may be two reasons for the fact that the topics in the second row are unlikely to appear in language development classes: irrelevance and controversy. As is suggested by Boix Mansilla and Jackson (2011), the topic the teacher chooses should have clear local-global connections: Given that students in Hungary are not directly affected by any of those issues (decolonisation, peace (or peacekeeping and war), AIDS), they may not choose these topics for discussion and their teachers deliberately do not deal with them. All the local issues that teachers rated low can be considered controversial or even taboo in some cultures and they belong to the PARSNIP topics, which may be the reason why teachers would be less likely to incorporate them into their lessons.