A balanced interrelation between theory and practice is still often missing out in many (language) teacher education programs (Esteve, 2018; Lantolf & Esteve, 2019). Hence the need to critically analyze teacher educators' professional practice and rethink it. This paper presents a deep reflection upon the difficulties and the possibilities of…

This study investigates email pragmatic instruction in four sets of international English textbooks. The prevalence of email communication in today's technology-mediated world necessitates its inclusion in second language classroom instruction. However, our analysis of the books reveals inadequate attention to the sociocultural aspects of email…

Language teachers are expected to engage in classroom assessment practices and report on learners' progress aligned with proficiency standards, as well as prepare learners for external examinations. The term "language assessment literacy" (LAL) describes what the constituency of language instructors needs to know about assessment…

This article addresses the problem of "education for all," and offers a research proposal that replaces procedural learning by a learning practice whereby all are engaged. Although educational research since 1990 of dialogical learning (DL) and collaborative learning (CL) have shown that it is possible to promote the learning practices…

James P. Lantolf is George and Jane Greer Professor Emeritus of Language Acquisition and Applied Linguistics and former director of the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Applied Linguistics in the same academic unit at Xi'an Jiaotong…

A prevailing challenge in teacher education is the "problem of enactment," a discrepancy in what teacher candidates (TCs) know or say about practice and what they can actually do or enact (Kennedy, 1999). Current practice-based teacher education research focuses on articulating pedagogies of practice and core practices to integrate…

Recent literature on the use of exemplars in the context of higher education has shown that exemplar-based instruction is implemented in various disciplines; nevertheless, how exemplar-based instruction can be implemented in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) writing classrooms in higher education institutions remains under-explored. In this…

This article examines how one educator embraced Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) while using drama to scaffold learning about Dr. Seuss's "The Lorax" for first-grade students. This learning event is interpreted with reference to the ZPD and the New London Group's pedagogy of multiliteracies. The author asserts…

Coteaching offers a model for the school-placement element of pre-service science teacher education, based on its demonstrated positive impacts on lessening classroom anxiety, supporting inquiry-based science teaching, improving students' attitudes, and addressing diversity effectively in science classrooms. Coteaching between pre-service and…

This study examines the work of the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices special interest group of the American Educational Research Association from the perspectives of its members with a focus on its development, scholarship, mentorship, practice, and community, and with the major goal of informing its future work. The nested multi-layered…

This article examines the relationship between spoken language research and ELT practice over the last 20 years. The first part is retrospective. It seeks first to capture the general tenor of recent spoken research findings through illustrative examples. The article then considers the sociocultural issues that arose when the relevance of these…

The present article presents an understanding of beliefs as conceptualizing activity from a Vygotskyan dialectical perspective. The proposals I develop here, emerging from a contextual understanding of development, aim to help us reconsider in pedagogical terms the specific relationships between beliefs and actions and the nature of beliefs as…

What does it mean to capably communicate across languages? This article introduces two theoretical models and a lesson plan format designed to facilitate the integration of proficiency, literacy, and culture teaching in foreign language teaching. The Second Symbolic Competencies Model configures proficiency and literacy as subordinate clusters of…

This article presents a sociolinguistically responsive model of pedagogy situated within existing sociocultural and communicative approaches to language learning and teaching. The specific focus of the discussion is on the French pronouns of address, "tu" and "vous". The article reviews previous research on second-person address in educational and…

Behind CALL teacher education (CTE) there is an unproblematized consensus of transfer, which suggests a positivist and tool-centered view of learning gains that differs from the sociocultural focus of recent teacher education research. Drawing on Beach's (2003) conceptualization of transfer as "consequential transition," this qualitative…