777539

research-article2018
LTR0010.1177/1362168818777539Language Teaching ResearchJohnson and Golombek

LANGUAGE
TEACHING
Article RESEARCH

Language Teaching Research

Informing and transforming

1­–12
© The Author(s) 2018
Reprints and permissions:
language teacher education sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1362168818777539
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168818777539
pedagogy journals.sagepub.com/home/ltr

Karen E. Johnson
The Pennsylvania State University, USA

Paula R. Golombek
University of Florida, USA

Abstract
Given emerging trends in where, why, how, and to what end English language teachers are
being prepared, we argue that greater attention to the design, enactment, and consequences of
language teacher education (LTE) pedagogy is critical in order to meet the needs of current and
future English language teachers in an increasingly diverse, mobile, unequal, and globalized world.
Through our experiences and conviction as researchers and teacher educators, we position a
Vygotskian sociocultural theoretical perspective as foundational to informing and transforming
LTE pedagogy. In this essay, we offer eight interrelated propositions that we believe constitute
LTE pedagogy as a central domain for the knowledge-base of LTE.

Keywords
knowledge-base of language teacher education, responsive mediation, sociocultural theory,
teacher cognition, teacher professional development

I Introduction
In 1998, the message was fairly clear: ‘teacher education has been much done, but rela-
tively little studied in the field’ (p. 398). While the original framework for re-conceptu-
alizing the knowledge-base of language teacher education (LTE) did acknowledge the
importance of ‘what teacher educators and language teachers do in their professional
worlds’ (p. 407), the focus was almost exclusively on the teacher, the learning of teach-
ing, and the content and activities of teaching; the focus was not on the teacher educator,

Corresponding author:
Karen E. Johnson, The Pennsylvania State University, 302 Sparks Building, University Park, 16802, USA.
Email: kej1@psu.edu
2 Language Teaching Research 00(0)

or what teacher educators do, what we are calling LTE pedagogy. Twenty years later, we
believe a framework for the knowledge-base of LTE must include greater attention to
LTE pedagogy; that is, what teacher educators do and say in their activities and interac-
tions and the reasoning behind those activities and interactions. And that attention must
be far-reaching.
Today, LTE programs take place in a vast array of sociocultural, educational, eco-
nomic, political, and institutional contexts. And these contexts matter. The globalization
of English has pushed LTE to prepare teachers for multifaceted and demanding instruc-
tional contexts, and these contexts compel us to think about LTE far beyond the tradi-
tional university-based teacher education program. Today, English language teachers are
being prepared via on-line programs/certificates, in large scale public sector re-training
programs for local teachers to teach English, and English for very specific technical and
semi-professional purposes (i.e. customer service, health care, court rooms). In the US
public school context, all K-12 teachers are now expected to be prepared to work effec-
tively to meet state requirements with a diverse group of multilingual students, with
Spanish being the home language of the largest group followed by Arabic, Chinese, and
Vietnamese (Samson & Collins, 2012). Across the European Union, teachers are being
prepared to teach content and language integrated learning (CLIL) where subjects such
as science, history, and geography are taught to students through a foreign language
(Coyle, Hood & Marsh, 2010). In Southeast Asia where English is increasingly becom-
ing the dominant international language, teachers who may not be proficient in English
themselves are being prepared to use English as the medium of instruction for subjects
such as mathematics, computer science, physics, chemistry, and biology (Nguyen, 2015).
Today, as never before, the contexts in which LTE programs are located and the goals of
these programs matter, and insider knowledge of the values, norms, and goals for the
preparation of English language teachers in these contexts is essential.
Given this shift in where, why, how, and to what end English language teachers are
being prepared, we argue that greater attention to the design, enactment, and conse-
quences of LTE pedagogy is critical in order to meet the needs of current and future
English language teachers in an increasingly diverse, mobile, unequal, and globalized
world. As we will detail in this article, greater attention to LTE pedagogy means making
explicit not just what teacher educators ask teachers to do in their teacher education pro-
grams but what we do, as teacher educators; our goals, intentions, expectations, the qual-
ity and character of our pedagogy, and the consequences of our pedagogy on the ways in
which teachers come to understand both the scope and impact of their teaching. Greater
attention to LTE pedagogy means demonstrating how teacher educators shape the social
situation of professional development by creating safe structured mediational spaces
where L2 teachers are supported as they grow into becoming and being L2 teachers.
Greater attention to LTE pedagogy means documenting the various ways in which
teacher educators recognize teachers’ potentiality and engage with them responsively in
order to support the development of L2 teacher (the person) and L2 teaching (the activ-
ity) expertise. Greater attention to LTE pedagogy means holding teacher educators
accountable for the teachers with whom they work and the students their teachers eventu-
ally teach. Going forward, we posit that LTE pedagogy be recognized as a central domain
in the knowledge-base of LTE.
Johnson and Golombek 3

II Theoretically informed LTE pedagogy: How do teachers

learn to teach?
For LTE pedagogy to be comprehensive and coherent, it must begin with teacher educa-
tors/education answering the question, ‘How do teachers learn to teach?’ While some
have embraced other theoretical perspectives on teacher learning, we have answered this
question as researchers and teacher educators by contending that a Vygotskian sociocul-
tural theoretical perspective (Vygotsky, 1978, 1986), representing a coherent theory of
mind, can inform and transform our conceptions and activities of LTE. We have written
extensively on the principles of this theory elsewhere (Johnson, 2009, Johnson &
Golombek, 2003, 2011a, 2016), and thus emphasize here the dialectic logic underlying
Vygotsky’s ideas and its relevance for the design, enactment, and consequences of LTE
pedagogy.
Vygotsky’s principle of the social genesis of higher psychological functions is central;
that is the development of an individual’s cognition emerges in participation in social
interaction that is mediated by people, concepts, and interaction. We envision the dia-
logic interactions that unfold in our LTE programs as the very external forms of social
interaction and activities that we hope, as teacher educators, will become internalized
psychological tools for teacher thinking, enabling our teachers to construct and enact
theoretically and pedagogically sound instructional practices for their students. In addi-
tion, our Vygotskian sociocultural stance is a transformative model of the human mind,
since Vygotsky argued that individuals transform what is appropriated for their own pur-
poses and in/for particular contexts of use. We recognize individuals as actors in and on
the social situations in which they are culturally and historically embedded, being both
shaped by and shaping the social situations of cognitive development. Therefore, psy-
chological processes are at the same time both socially derived – embedded within the
historical practices of a culture –and individually unique. For L2 teachers, this means
that they are shaped in and through their experiences as learners engaging with teachers
and other learners, the cultural practices of teacher education, and the particulars of their
teaching contexts: all embedded within larger sociocultural histories yet appropriated in
individualized ways.
Vygotsky’s broader project sought to overcome the deficiencies of the binary logic that
dominated the field of psychology of his time (i.e. mind versus body) and centered on
uncovering how dialectical principles functioned in the domain of human consciousness,
specifically the uniquely human ability to use symbols to mediate the psyche (Mahn,
2009). Dialectic thinking is ‘the logic of interconnectivity, of movement, of change, and
accepts as fundamental that reality is constantly changing especially through the dialectic
unity of opposing forces’ (Novack, 1971 pp. 77–78). Put simply, to understand anything
in our everyday experience, we must know something about how it arose and developed
(processes) and how it fits into the larger context or system of which it is a part (relations).
The interconnectedness of these processes and relations enable us to use dialectic logic to
deconstruct the present to find its preconditions in the past. This, in turn, allows us to
project its possible future, seeking out the preconditions of the future in the present. In
essence, we are asking how did the present come to be as it is? What could it be? And what
is happening now that allows us to imagine, and realize, that future?
4 Language Teaching Research 00(0)

For teacher educators, this means thinking dialectically and having a theorized idea
of how, when, and into what we expect teachers to change their thinking and activity,
all the while recognizing why they may not change, or choose not to change, in ways
that we may have intended and/or imagined. This also means recognizing the complex-
ity of change as being non-linear, fitful, and ongoing. When we respond to our teach-
ers’ blog entries, when we discuss their videotaped instruction, or when we ask them
to conduct narrative inquiry projects, we continually ask ourselves, ‘given the activity
we are currently asking our teachers to engage in (present), how have their ways of
thinking, talking, and acting come to be as they are (past)?’ Additionally, we ask our-
selves ‘how can we collaboratively co-construct an imagined future, one in which
teachers come to embody theoretically and pedagogically sound ways of thinking,
talking, and acting (future)?’ This sort of dialectical thinking compels us to recognize
that while we are engaged in the present, we must collaboratively and cooperatively
acknowledge the past and imagine the future, all the while recognizing what we are
doing as happening in an evolving, ever-changing and challenging system. Given its
emergent, individuated, and goal-oriented nature, LTE pedagogy is demanding and
consequential.

III LTE pedagogy as a central domain for the

knowledge-base of LTE
These dialectical principles have informed our most recent work in which we propose
responsive mediation as a psychological tool that can assist teacher educators as they
orient to and enact intentional and systematic pedagogies designed to support the profes-
sional development of language teacher/ teaching expertise (Johnson & Golombek,
2016). The central tenants of responsive mediation will be spelled out in what follows;
however, with a Vygotskian sociocultural theoretical perspective as foundational to our
LTE pedagogy, we offer eight interrelated propositions that we believe constitute LTE
pedagogy as a central domain for the knowledge-base of LTE. LTE pedagogy must:

1. be located;
2. recognize who the teacher is and who the teacher wishes to become;
3. be intentional and goal-directed: these intentions and goals must be made
explicit;
4. create opportunities to externalize everyday concepts while internalizing relevant
academic concepts through authentic, goal-directed activities of teaching;
5. contain structured mediational spaces where teachers are encouraged to play/step
into being and becoming a teacher;
6. involve expert mediation that is responsive to teachers’ immediate and future
needs;
7. have a self-inquiry dimension, involving teacher educators and teachers working
together or by themselves, in which they seek to trace teacher professional devel-
opment as it unfolds over time and place;
8. demonstrate a relationship of influence between teacher professional develop-
ment (as a result of LTE pedagogies) and student learning.
Johnson and Golombek 5

1  LTE pedagogy must be located

Since LTE pedagogy emerges out of and takes place in particular social-cultural con-
texts, recognizing the values, goals, meanings, and practices that constitute LTE peda-
gogy is paramount. These values, goals, meanings, and practices are emergent and
dynamic, shifting human activities that change over time and having different outcomes.
They are made more complex by the competing exigencies of being global, national,
institutional, and individual. As a result, teacher educators must create locally appropri-
ate professional development opportunities, practices, and resources that are socially,
culturally, historically, and institutionally situated in and responsive to teachers’, stu-
dents’, and community needs. This is neither a straightforward nor easy undertaking.
Context is not limited to specific geopolitical boundaries but includes sociopolitical,
sociohistorical, and/or socioeconomic contexts that shape and are shaped by local and
global events. This expansive context inevitably means that creating located LTE peda-
gogy will be riddled with contradictions and may have acute emotional and material
consequences for teachers. For example, located LTE pedagogy seeks to empower teach-
ers to both scrutinize and navigate the consequences that broader macrostructures, such
as educational policies and curricular mandates, have on their daily classroom practices.
This is both a macro- and microenterprise because it requires attending to the socioeco-
nomic and ideological structures that shape and are shaped by the contexts in which
teachers and students live and work. Yet, teachers must frequently enact standardized
curriculum and tests mandated by government policies that invoke discourses of ‘English
for economic success’ and questioning the feasibility and morality of such policies can
have severe consequences for teachers, such as emotional burnout, being labeled as a
troublemaker, or getting fired. Finally, located LTE pedagogy recognizes how teachers
position themselves and are positioned in the contexts in which they work, how and why
they enact their teaching practices as they do, and most importantly, the kinds of learning
environments they are willing and able to create for their students. Again, contradictions
typically emerge between how teachers position themselves – their ideal – and how they
are positioned by institutions, government policies, and cultural values, resulting in cer-
tain material ways of enacting classroom instruction – their reality. We thus acknowledge
how challenging, even risky, it is to enact located LTE pedagogy because of the inevita-
ble, deeply historical and ideological contradictions that may emerge. At the same time,
such contradictions have transformative potential if they become the focus of collabora-
tive problem-solving endeavors by interested participants.

2  LTE pedagogy must recognize who the teacher is and who the
teacher wishes to become
Teacher educators must begin with and continue to learn more about who the teacher,
pre-service or in-service, is as a whole historically and culturally situated person with a
particular knowledge base, identity, emotionally and cognitively constructed way of per-
ceiving themselves and their teaching activities. This involves working to gain a sense of
teachers’ past and present, including the complex interplay of cognition and emotion,
with an eye towards the future. To do so, Vygotsky argued that it is essential to recognize
6 Language Teaching Research 00(0)

one’s perezhivanie, or ‘the subjective significance of lived experiences that contribute to

the development of one’s personality, especially the emotional and visceral impact of
lived experiences on the prism through which all future experiences are refracted’ (van
de Veer & Valsiner, 1994 p. 339). Establishing a sense of teachers’ perezhivanie can help
teacher educators understand teachers’ past (e.g. apprenticeship of observation) and pre-
sent (e.g. how they are experiencing the practices of teacher education) and engage in
mediation that is responsive to teachers’ future (the teacher they envision being). For
pre-service teachers this may involve making the shift from students of teaching to nov-
ice teachers. For in-service teachers this may involve taking on and trying out the (re)
envisioned and/or (re)invigorated teachers they seek to become.
Who the teacher is and who that teacher wants to become is inevitably tied to teacher
identity: what language teachers do in the classroom expresses how they construe them-
selves as teachers. A central role in LTE pedagogy is enabling teachers to adopt, try out,
and develop a teacher identity throughout their learning-to-teach experiences or in their
current instructional contexts. Part of that process is creating opportunities for teachers
to articulate their teacher identities and to develop the instructional philosophy and prac-
tices that align with that identity. Predictably, teachers face contradictions when the val-
ues, norms, and expectations of a particular institutional or sociocultural community
conflicts with the identities they are attempting to enact. For example, Chinese teachers
educated in MA TESL (teaching English as a second language) programs in North
America often struggle to teach more communicatively when they return to the test-ori-
ented educational system that dominates English education in China. Thus, supporting
teacher identity development means enabling teachers to both navigate and develop
pedagogical practices that align with that identity in a located teaching setting.

3  LTE pedagogy must be intentional and goal-directed: these intentions

and goals must be made explicit
LTE pedagogy must be intentional and goal-directed, and this requires that teacher educa-
tors make explicit their motives, intentions, goals, and ideologies when designing, sequenc-
ing, and enacting LTE pedagogy. The unpacking of what teacher educators have internalized,
their conceptual thinking, means externalizing their own expertise – the what, how, and
why of their practices and interactions – and documenting the consequences of their peda-
gogy for the teachers with whom they work. In this process, teacher educators will con-
comitantly develop greater self-awareness and expertise to better support the teachers with
whom they work. Meanwhile, both pre-service and in-service teachers enter LTE programs
expecting to engage in practices that will, by design, enable them to materialize and enact
theoretically and pedagogically sound instructional practices that support productive lan-
guage learning within the contexts in which they teach. Meeting these expectations requires
teacher educators to explicitly recognize who teachers are, where they are in cognitive,
affective, and experiential terms, how they are experiencing both being and becoming
teachers, and what they are collectively attempting to accomplish throughout the LTE pro-
gram. We have exemplified this in our own work by systematically examining our prac-
tices as teacher educators (Johnson & Golombek, 2016).
Johnson and Golombek 7

4  LTE pedagogy must create opportunities to externalize everyday

concepts while internalizing relevant academic concepts through
authentic, goal-directed activities of teaching
We know that teachers enter LTE programs with a life-time of schooling experiences
as students. This long-term process of socialization leads teachers to develop everyday
concepts about what is and is not supposed to happen in classrooms. Because as stu-
dents they see teaching from ‘the other side of the desk’, teachers’ everyday concepts
about language teachers and teaching are often implicit, unanalyzed, superficial, erro-
neous, or prejudiced. This is further complicated in LTE because students also have
everyday concepts about the English language; being able to use the language without
knowing about the language and knowing formalized rules about the language but not
being able to communicate through it. Vygotsky argued that formal or school learning
provides an ideal setting to scrutinize and unite everyday concepts through and with
academic concepts, systematic and generalizable knowledge of entities and phenome-
non in the world. Yet, he cautioned against the futility of direct teaching: ‘A teacher
who tries to do this usually accomplishes nothing but empty verbalism, a parrot like
repetition of words by the child, simulating a knowledge of the corresponding concepts
but actually covering up a vacuum’ (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 150). The goal of concept
development is for academic concepts and everyday concepts to become united into
true concepts; an academic concept ‘gradually comes down to concrete phenomena’
and an everyday concept ‘goes from the phenomenon upward toward generalizations’
(p. 148). Thus, teachers’ everyday concepts provide a basis from which to understand
and interact with academic concepts introduced in LTE programs. For example, most
L2 teachers know, from their everyday experience, that the present progressive tense
in English is marked for regular verbs with the suffix -ing. Yet, few may be consciously
aware of the complex relationship between tense (location of time), aspect (flow of
time), and mood (degree of necessity, obligation, probability, ability) that work in con-
cert to trigger language users to make certain choices about how to denote actions in
time and space. In most L2 teacher education programs, teachers do have opportunities
to learn the academic concepts that represent the systematic generalized knowledge
that has emerged from theory and research of their subject matter content (i.e. knowl-
edge about language, second language acquisition, multi-literacies, etc.), however,
more often than not these academic concepts are not linked to the day-to-day activities
of teaching/learning in L2 classrooms. Internalization of ‘true concepts’ requires that
‘academic concepts’ be linked in sustained, intentional, and systematic ways to the
day-to-day activities of teaching/learning in classrooms if they are to re-structure
teachers’ everyday understandings and gradually enable them to enact their concep-
tions and related activities of teaching purposefully; that is, use true concepts as tools
for thinking (psychological tools). When teachers think in concepts, they are able to
think through the demands of new teaching situations, identify their instructional
objectives within the affordances and constraints of their instructional context, design
connected instructional practices, and articulate the pedagogical reasons underlying
their thinking and activity.
8 Language Teaching Research 00(0)

5  LTE pedagogy must contain structured mediational spaces where

teachers are encouraged to play/step into being and becoming a teacher
Within the practices of LTE pedagogy, we conceptualize structured spaces as embodying
an array of interconnected intentional and goal-directed activities and interactions, the
pedagogical reasoning for which teacher educators/teacher education programs have
made explicit. These may represent a range of teaching/learning experiences that teach-
ers have during a teacher education program (coursework, practicum, reflective journals
etc.) or distinct professional development activities (peer-coaching, teacher study groups,
action research etc.) that are embedded in a single teacher education course or profes-
sional development workshop. Mediation highlights the central role that expert others
(teacher educators, peer teachers, etc.), as well as academic concepts play in the practices
of LTE pedagogy. Therefore, structured mediational spaces and the teacher/teacher edu-
cator dialogic interactions that emerge in these spaces are intentionally designed to
encourage teachers to make their everyday concepts explicit, to reflect on and critique
them, and to externalize their current understandings of what, how, and why they teach
the way they do. They are designed to create opportunities for teacher educators to make
their expertise explicit, to model conceptual thinking, and to introduce relevant academic
concepts that support teachers as they re-conceptualize their teaching activities. Within
these structured mediational spaces, teacher educators should identify the upper levels of
teachers’ potential (i.e. zone of proximal development) as teachers attempt to enact their
teaching activities in ways that are beyond their current levels of competence and com-
fort. Thus, structured mediational spaces should be intentionally designed to function as
a ‘safe zone’ for teachers to play with their emerging understanding of the academic
concepts they have been exposed to and/or as they attempt to enact alternative ways of
teaching that they are not yet able to do without assistance. Creating safe structured
mediational spaces also enable teacher educators to responsively address teachers’
immediate cognitive and emotional understanding, needs, and/or concerns, supporting
them as they take up and try out emerging teacher identities, alternative instructional
practices, and new modes of engagement in teaching. These spaces embody the practices
and interactions that teacher educators enact in intentional and systematic ways in order
to think together with teachers, to question, to validate, to model teacherly thinking and
activities, to share expertise, and to push teachers beyond what they are capable of alone.

6  LTE pedagogy must involve expert mediation that is responsive to

teachers’ immediate and future needs
We have recently captured this proposition through the concept of responsive mediation,
which is grounded in dialectic logic (Johnson & Golombek, 2016). Responsive media-
tion begins with teacher educators making explicit their motives, intentions, and goals
underlying their LTE pedagogy, as well as externalizing their own complex interplay of
cognition and emotion, as they interpret through their own perezhivanie the emerging
relationships and interactions with the teachers with whom they work. This represents
one aspect of teacher educator expertise. Responsive mediation also involves having the
expertise to learn as much as they can about these teachers, their histories, knowledge,
Johnson and Golombek 9

abilities, perezhivanie, goals, and identities to which they aspire. Teacher educators fine-
tune their mediation as they develop understandings of how teachers have come to be
who and where they are (processes), as well as how they and what they do fit into the
larger sociocultural contexts in which they operate (relations). Responsive mediation
requires that teacher educators focus on the particulars embedded in teachers’ current
instructional context, including the challenges, tensions, and joys the teachers are expe-
riencing. By comprehending more about their teachers and addressing these particulars
with teachers, teacher educators fine-tune their understandings of teachers’ immediate
needs and capabilities, engaging in responsive mediation, as they attempt to identify the
upper limits of teachers’ potential. Responsive mediation then connects the particulars
and the abstract, as we describe above, by introducing academic concepts to restructure
everyday concepts, so that new generalizations take shape and true concepts begin to
emerge. We emphasize how demanding this is cognitively for teacher educators given its
emergent, dynamic, interactive nature, requiring teacher educators to have tremendous
professional expertise. At the same time, it is demanding in affective terms given how
vulnerable teachers may feel during their learning-to-teach experiences and due to the
supervisory and/or evaluative role teacher educators are expected to perform at many
institutions. Likewise, we recognize that meeting all teachers’ future needs is a quixotic
task within the constraints of any given LTE program. Creating opportunities for teach-
ers to reflect on and re-conceptualize how they might enact their teaching practices in
varied instructional contexts will no doubt be part of the life-long professional develop-
ment of all L2 teachers.

7  LTE pedagogy must have a self-inquiry dimension, involving teacher

educators and teachers working together or by themselves, in which they
seek to trace teacher professional development as it unfolds over time
and place
This proposition involves answering the following questions: What does teacher profes-
sional development look like? What does it lead to? And how do the specific LTE peda-
gogies teachers are involved in enable them to develop L2 teacher/teaching expertise?
We have argued that this sort of teacher-directed, teacher educator-mediated self-inquiry
can take shape through what we have called teacher narrative inquiry as professional
development, characterized as ‘systematic exploration that is conducted by teachers and
for teachers through their own stories and language’ (Johnson & Golombek, 2002, p. 6).
As much as we believe this sort of self-inquiry is done for teachers by teachers, our
Vygotskian sociocultural epistemological stance requires that we position self-inquiry
activities as deeply embedded in institutional contexts and teacher education practices
and actors that mold both what and how teachers learn to teach (Golombek & Johnson,
2017). Engagement in narrative activity has the potential to ignite certain cognitive pro-
cesses that can, with expert mediation, transform teachers’ thinking and doing (Johnson
& Golombek, 2011b). As teachers engage in narrative inquiry over time and place, they
can trace their own development, as it is unfolding, reflect on and narrate about their
learning to teach experiences, and engage in a (re)constructive process where they can
10 Language Teaching Research 00(0)

(re)interpret their experiences as learners of teaching. Doing so allows them to construct

local knowledge that is socially, culturally, historically, and institutionally situated in and
responsive to teachers’, students’ and community needs, the kinds of knowledge integral
to located teacher education. Such local knowledge, constructed through narrative
inquiry, can then inform teacher educators as they work to create located teacher
education.

8  LTE pedagogy must demonstrate a relationship of influence between

teacher professional development (as a result of LTE pedagogies) and
student learning
Much research on teacher cognition has focused on what Kubanyiova and Feryok (2015)
have recently conceptualized as the ecologies of teachers’ inner lives without consider-
ing how this connects to student learning. LTE pedagogy must demonstrate the connec-
tion between teacher learning and student learning, what Freeman and Johnson (2005)
characterized as a relationship of influence. The relationship of influence between
teacher learning and student learning, from a Vygotskian sociocultural stance, is viewed
as being in a dialectic in which they mutually shape each other as they interact within
various teaching-learning activities. The fact that the fields of LTE specifically and
Applied Linguistics more generally have repeatedly called for this kind of research while
having little to show for it indicates how methodologically tricky such research is. We
have advocated that one approach is longitudinal, thick description efforts; teachers and
teacher educators work separately and collaboratively to trace the internal activity of
teacher professional learning as it is unfolding, detail the mediational means shaping
teacher learning, and explain how and why teachers re-shape their instructional thinking
and activities. Parallel with this, teachers must investigate how student engagement in
such activities influences what and how students learn (Johnson & Golombek, 2018).
Finally, this proposition supports our contention about the value of teacher voices in
contributing to the knowledge-base of language teacher education (Johnson & Golombek,
2002), arguing that teachers are in an ideal position to investigate how their learning is
enacted in instruction, how students respond to that instruction, and how students’
responses shape how teachers continually navigate, arrange, and re-arrange their instruc-
tion. Self-inquiry that documents and traces the dialectic of teacher-student learning can
offer insights into this relationship of influence.

IV Conclusions
Through our experiences and conviction as researchers and teacher educators of LTE, we
position a Vygotskian sociocultural theoretical perspective as foundational to informing
and transforming LTE pedagogy. The eight propositions outlined here constitute what we
believe to be essential to LTE pedagogy. Going forward, we posit LTE pedagogy as a
central domain for the knowledge-base of language teacher education. Still, we recog-
nize that enacting these propositions represents an ideal, fraught with challenges. The
realities of LTE pedagogy and language teaching ‘on the ground’ will undoubtedly shape
Johnson and Golombek 11

and reshape the quality and character of LTE pedagogy as teacher educators seek to
address local institutional contexts and individual teacher needs. It is our hope that
greater attention to the design, enactment, and consequences of LTE pedagogy will better
realize the professional development of current and future language teachers in a con-
tinually changing and interconnected world.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

References
Coyle, D., Hood, P., & Marsh, D. (2010). CLIL: Content and language integrated learning.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Freeman, D., & Johnson, K.E. (2005). Towards linking teacher knowledge and student learning. In
Tedick, D.J. (Ed.), Language teacher education: International perspectives on research and
practice. (pp. 73–95) Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Golombek, P.R., & Johnson, K.E. (2017). Re-conceptualizing teachers’ narrative inquiry as pro-
fessional development. PROFILE Issues in Teachers’ Professional Development, 19, 15–28.
Johnson, K.E. (2009). Second language teacher education: A sociocultural perspective. New
York: Routledge.
Johnson, K.E., & Golombek, P.R. (Eds.) (2002). Teachers’ narrative inquiry as professional
development. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, K. E., & Golombek, P. R. (2003). “Seeing” teacher learning. TESOL Quarterly, 37(4)
729–738.
Johnson, K.E., & Golombek, P.R. (Eds.) (2011a). Research on second language teacher educa-
tion: A sociocultural perspective on professional development. New York: Routledge.
Johnson, K.E., & Golombek, P.R. (2011b). The transformative power of narrative in L2 teacher
education. TESOL Quarterly, 45, 1–24.
Johnson, K.E., & Golombek, P.R. (2016). Mindful L2 teacher education. New York: Routledge.
Johnson, K.E., & Golombek, P.R. (2018). Making L2 teacher education matter through
Vygotskian-inspired pedagogy and research. In Lantolf, J., & M. Poehner (Eds.),
Handbook of Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Development (pp. 73–95) New
York: Routledge.
Kubanyiova, M., & Feryok, A. (2015) Language teacher cognition in applied linguistics research:
Revisiting the territory, redrawing the boundaries, reclaiming the relevance, The Modern
Language Journal, 99, 435–449.
Mahn, H. (2009). Vygotsky’s methodological approach: A blueprint for the future of psychology.
Toomela, A., & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Methodological thinking in psychology: 60 years gone
astray? (pp. 297–323). Charlotte, NC: Information Age.
Nguyen, A.T. (2015). Towards an examiners training model for standardized oral assessment qual-
ities in Vietnam. Malaysian Journal of ELT Research, 11, 41–51.
Novack, G. (1971). An introduction to the logic of Marxism. New York: Pathfinder.
12 Language Teaching Research 00(0)

Samson, J.F., & Collins, B.A. (2012). Preparing all teachers to meet the needs of English language
learners: Applying research to policy and practice for teacher effectiveness. Washington,
DC: Center for American Progress.
van de Veer, R., & Valsiner, J. (Eds.). (1994). The Vygotsky reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes.
Edited by Cole, M., John-Steiner, V., Scribner, S., & E. Souberman. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1986). Thought and language. Translated by A. Kozulin. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.