Although there are many disagreements about its definition and how it should be applied, reflection is an important professional development tool in teacher education. If in-service teachers think in-depth about critical incidents and reflect on them, they can develop new understandings of the teaching and learning process. The study investigated…

Symbolic competence is integral to intercultural teaching and learning, but limited research and teaching guidance exist in foreign language classrooms. This paper explores the use of critical incidents in developing the symbolic competence of advanced-level English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners at a Chinese university. Mixed methods…

Canada is facing a nationwide shortage of teachers of French as a second language. The profession is experiencing significant retention issues, with many teachers leaving the field within the first five years. One of the solutions proposed to address the challenges of teacher retention is for post-secondary institutions to integrate the concept…

Purpose: Despite the growth of theory and research on young English learners and the widely-recognized importance of critical incidents (CIs) in teachers' professional development (PD), little research has examined young-learner teachers' CIs. This study investigated the impacts of a PD course structured around CIs sharing/discussing on 14 L2…

Faculty who do not speak the language of instruction in their universities as their first language face additional challenges in teaching. This study aimed to investigate a non-native speaker faculty member, Eisuke Saito, who had attempted to manage and overcome language challenges in teaching. Through an autobiographical self-study of teacher…

The present study investigated critical incidents in multilingual classrooms from teachers' perspectives to identify resources to make multilingual classrooms succeed. Our study is embedded in identity theories such as Mead's symbolic interactionism, translanguaging, and global language theory. The incidents referred to the language of…

This study aims at exploring the professional identities of six ELT students through the lens of critical incidents. For the sake of this aim, six ELT students took part in this research at an Anatolian High School in 2018-2019 spring semester. The teaching practicum process was conducted from April to mid of May 2019, once a week over six-week…

Believing teachers as agents who actively make meaning about their professional identities, we depict the construction of our identity as three mid-career female English language teachers. Anchored by collaborative autoethnography (CAE) and arts-based educational research (ABER) approaches, we explored and reflected on our lived critical…

Experiential learning activities have been largely used in education including English language teaching. Study abroad programs offer unique opportunities for learning from experience. Maximising learning from the sojourn experiences should be a major objective of higher education institutions with study abroad programs and designing post-sojourn…

Despite the recognition of the importance of teachers' professional development, the exploration of teachers' Critical Incidents (CIs) as a type of professional development initiative has received insufficient attention in L2 teaching contexts. Motivated by the dearth of research in this area and building on complexity theory as its conceptual…

While research on teachers' Critical Incidents (CIs) has grown exponentially, little research has been done on teachers' assessment-related CIs, much less examining the contributions of such CIs to their identity sense-making. This study aimed to fill some of this gap by exploring assessment-related CIs of 13 Iranian L2 teachers and the associated…

Knowledge and human identity are socially constructed phenomena. Like other aspects of human identity, teacher identity is shaped through social influences. Some of the social influences that contribute to teacher identity development happen through critical incidents that teachers or teacher candidates experience. The current study, adopting a…

Language learning is a life-long process. In a world that connects people across nations through study, work, travel and socializing, new chances and challenges arise, intensifying a need to improve modern foreign language skills. The aim of language education, therefore, should not be limited to providing mere language instruction but it should…

Epistemological beliefs -- such as beliefs about the value attached to different forms of language teacher knowledge -- play a key role in knowledge interpretation and reconstruction in language teacher education. This article first presents a case for an explicit focus on epistemological beliefs in an ELT train-the-trainer program for state…

In this climate of the expansion of globalization, in today's classrooms, encouraging student investment in writing is paramount. Due to the complicatedness of this skill, many teachers find it difficult to make their learners aware of the divergent phases of writing so they produce better compositions. Thus, the professionalism of teachers is…