Diversity And Transformation In Language Teacher Education Selected Papers From The 10th And 11th Language Teacher Education Conferences

This volume contains selected papers from the tenth and eleventh International Language Teacher Education (LTE) conferences held in 2017 at the University of California, Los Angeles, and in 2019 at the University of Minnesota, respectively. In keeping with the mission of the biennial LTE conference, both events addressed the education of teachers of all languages, at all instructional and institutional levels, and in all the many national and international contexts in which this takes place, including: English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) instruction; foreign/modern/world language teaching; bilingual education; immersion education; indigenous language education; heritage language education; and the teaching of less commonly taught languages. A common theme across the two LTE conferences was diversity. Whereas the first conference targeted the diverse nature of student populations in an increasingly multilingual world and the importance of language teacher educators in addressing the challenges and potentials of this diversity, the second conference highlighted the desire to explore teachers and teacher educators as individuals functioning within diverse sociocultural contexts. The papers in this volume provide a view into this diversity as they address the various perspectives, contexts, languages, and frameworks in which language teacher education takes place.

This book presents a new set of ideas to challenge established thinking and to guide researching and designing teacher professional development. Grounded in the work of the Learning4Teaching Project which documented public-sector teachers’ experiences and learning from professional development in three countries, the volume presents a sociomaterial perspective on teacher sensemaking. This teacher-centered perspective disputes the "conventional calculus" in which teachers learn content that they apply in their classrooms. Part I outlines conventional issues in how teacher learning and professional development have been conceptualized and studied; Part II introduces a new group of concepts that rethink these assumptions; and Part III offers important insights to inform professional development across disciplines, cultures, and contexts. Written by a leading international teacher educator in an accessible style that incorporates visual representations and project data, the book will appeal to practitioners, scholars, and researchers who design and research how teachers learn in professional development.

Expanding Our Horizons: Language Teacher Education in the 21st Century This edited volume on language teacher education includes fourteen refereed papers based on presentations at either the 6th International Conference on Language Teacher Education (held in Washington DC in May 2009) or 7th International Conference on Language Teacher Education (held in Minneapolis, MN in May 2011). The papers showcase research and practice related to the education of language teachers from many different national and international contexts including foreign language education, English as a Second/Foreign Language, and heritage language instruction. This sharing of ideas and insights into language teacher education in such diverse international, national, and disciplinary contexts is truly intended to help all language teacher educators to expand their horizons and improve their practice.

Embracing a sociocultural perspective on human cognition and employing an array of methodological tools for data collection and analysis, this volume documents the complexities of second language teachers’ professional development in diverse L2 teacher education programs around the world, including Asia, South America, Europe, and North America, and traces that development both over time and within the broader cultural, historical and institutional settings and circumstances of teachers’ work. This systematic examination of teacher professional development illuminates in multiple ways the discursive practices that shape teachers’ knowing, thinking, and doing and provides a window into how alternative mediational means can create opportunities for teachers to move toward more theoretically and pedagogically sound instructional practices within the settings and circumstances of their work. The chapters represent both native and nonnative English speaking pre-service and in-service L2 teachers at all levels from K-12 through higher education, and examine significant challenges that are present in L2 teacher education programs.