Core Practices for World Language Teaching in the United States During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This chapter presents the results of a nationwide questionnaire of world language teachers in the United States (n=135) that sought to examine how they perceived the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their ability to enact certain “core practices” for world language teaching. Quantitative analysis of Likert items and qualitative analysis of open-ended questions allowed for the examination of the teacher's perceptions of their practice related to three core practices that have been identified as essential to the work of contextualized, standards-based instruction. The findings contribute to an understanding of the realities of world language teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, the disruptions created by it, and the challenges faced in carrying out the work of world language teaching. Given these insights, suggestions are made for ways forward for the work in core practices in world language teacher education, as well as for pedagogies for practice-based world language teacher education.

Building Racial Justice Into a Master's Program

This chapter describes a five-year equity initiative to transform a language teacher education professional master's program into one that cultivates racial justice and equity-minded practices in graduates. This chapter will review program work over the last five years on two critical efforts involved in the ongoing five-year equity-minded initiatives. The program activities include data review and planning from 2017 to 2018 and equity curricular re-design from 2018 to 2020, where faculty revised program goals, curriculum, and syllabi. Critical race theory and equity-mindedness frameworks guided this equity initiative's process, goals, and content. The authors argue that building racial justice into a professional master's program requires applying a critical race analysis to the normative assumptions about academic program redesign. Individual and institutional challenges are discussed, and recommendations for building racial justice into the curriculum, instruction, and program policies are provided.

Investigating Professional Teacher Identity through ESP Courses: Voices from Three EFL Instructors via Case Studies

The current zeitgeist in language teacher education dwells on teacher identity regarding it as one of the big buzzwords to explore and critically reflect teacher qualities from a socio-cognitive perspective. Drawing from this current trend, the research intended to disambiguate three English language instructors’ sense of self-efficacy, perceptions, professional identity and professional competence in one of the most established and prestigious state universities in the country through the qualitative case study method. After selecting ESP practitioners following convenience sampling, autobiographies, informal dialogues, classroom observations, opening interviews, post-observation interviews, and field notes were utilized to gather data. Having scrutinized the professional identities of instructors through the lens of self-efficacy beliefs, perceptions, and professional competence, the study exposed that professional competence came to the fore being the best mediator to gain awareness of professional teacher identity. However, self-efficacy did not subserve as a predictor in exploring the complexity of teacher identity due to discordance with perceptions and realities of identity issues. Finally, some suggestions for further considerations were stated to be operationalized within the EFL context of in-service language teacher education.

THE ORGANISATION OF RESEARCH IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHER PREPARATION IN THE US UNIVERSITIES

Although research has been shown to expedite the professional growth and development of prospective specialists, less is known about the effective world practices in undergraduate and graduate research that could be applied in Ukrainian language teacher education. The present article explores the characteristics of student resear ch in US foreign language teacher education. The study focused on the analysis of academic literature, normative resources and the practical experience of language teacher preparation with the aim of extrapolating good practices into the Ukrainian system of language teacher education. It was shown that student research integrates didactic approaches with elements of creative activity, individual research projects, culminating projects, the study of specialised disciplines, individual and group scientific inquiry, not included in the curricula of educational programmes. The organisational forms of the latter are research symposia, seminars, workshops, conferences, preparation of scientific publications and some others. Among the central tasks of undergraduate and graduate research is the preparation of highly qualified, autonomous specialists, who are capable of accumulating and generating scientific knowledge, skillful application of professional knowledge in approaching the task of teaching; familiarising students with the methodology for organising and conducting research in the field of foreign language education; increasing motivation for scientific inquiry and professional development, intensification of learning; promotion of critical and reflective thinking, professional self-identification and self-realisation; stimulating the need for continuous self-development; implementation of individualisation and differentiation principles in language teacher education; replenishment of the cohort of scientific and pedagogical staff. The research competence is developed through diverse didactic forms and approaches; it is characterised mainly by electiveness at the undergraduate level and is a mandatory component of the graduate programmes’ curricula in foreign language teacher education.

Toward a Decolonizing Framework for Equity-Oriented English Language Teacher Education

In this article I critically review the current literature on English language teaching (elt), (neo)colonialism, and empire to advance a decolonizing framework for equity-oriented English language teacher education (elte). This framework first argues that teachers should be supported to understand and confront linguistic imperialism of the English empire to promote plurilingual approaches to elt while developing students’ critical awareness of power. Second, it contends that instead of asking elt professionals to apply Western centered pedagogies that are often ill-suited to their local instructional realities, they should be supported to develop their own praxis. Third, it calls for disrupting epistemological racism to reclaim local knowledge. Lastly, it emphasizes the need to unsettle colonial ontology of white supremacy and native-speakerism that render teachers of color and nonnative English speakers (nnes) as perpetual Others. The article concludes with a call for action to prepare language teachers to disrupt racism, (neo)colonialism, and inequality through their praxis.

PROFESSIONAL DIGITAL COMPETENCE IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION

This article aims to unpack the term ‘professional digital competence’ and similar notions in language teacher education, to explore the existing Digital Competence Frameworks and their constituents. We also targeted to identify the most relevant findings in terms of digital competence of university language teachers through the analysis of scientific production in specialized literatures in the last decade (2012-2022). A search was carried out on Scopus database. After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, the sample was made up of 11 articles. The main findings helped to reveal the list of aspects investigated in terms of technology enhanced-foreign language teaching.