Recent policy reforms in Scotland mean that all primary teachers are expected to teach a foreign language (FL) to children from age 5, introducing a second language around age 9. This small-scale research study aimed to ascertain 38 primary teachers' perceptions of their confidence to teach an FL to primary learners and what they felt would be…

Recent scholarship in professional development (PD) has advocated for solid conceptual frameworks and understanding of the complex process involved in how language educators may continue to develop and fulfil the current challenging teaching demands. However, specific relationships underlying departmental cultures and how language educators relate…

Foreign language teaching in distance education is administratively and pedagogically challenging; research on the perspectives of novice practitioners' online teaching is also relatively scarce. This study explores how a novice Japanese teacher navigated and negotiated her professional development in a two-way virtual practitionership during her…

Considering the need for writing and language programs to develop translingual and transdisciplinary pedagogies for teacher development at the graduate level (Canagarajah, 2016; Williams & Rodrigue, 2016), the authors examine the design of a multilingual pedagogy professional development series for first-year Spanish and Writing teaching…

Using Dornyei's (2005) L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS) and Kubanyiova's (2007, 2009) model of 'possible language teacher selves' as main theoretical frameworks, this multiple case study explored four language teaching assistants' developmental patterns with regards to their ideal language teacher selves over a two-year period. It also examined…

International teaching assistants (ITA's) perform a variety of instructional roles in undergraduate education within North American universities. ITA training programs often exist to prepare them for such roles. Empirical work has examined ITA training courses, but most often through the practitioner's lens of program evaluation, which obscures…

In our post-9/11 globalized society, the bifurcated governance structure that has traditionally dominated foreign language (FL) departments is no longer desirable. According to the 2007 Modern Language Association (MLA) report entitled "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World," these departments need to…

This collection of papers is divided into two parts. After "Introduction" (L. Kathy Heilenman), Part 1, "Research and Language Program Directors: The Relationship," includes "Research Domains and Language Program Direction" (Bill VanPatten); "Language Program Direction and the Modernist Agenda" (Celeste…