INTRODUCTION

L2 teacher education has been something we have done, rather than something we have studied, for much of our professional history. And the doing of L2 teacher education, that is, how we prepare L2 teachers to do the work of this profession, has been influenced by several trends that have helped to reconceptualize the ways in which we think about L2 teachers, L2 teacher learning, and L2 teaching. Fueling these trends have been shifting epistemological perspectives on learning in general, and on L2 learning and L2 teacher learning in particular, which have occurred in how various intellectual traditions had come to conceptualize human learning. More specifically, these include historically documented shifts from behaviorist to cognitive to situated, social, and distributed views of human cognition (Cobb and Bowers 1999; Greeno, Collins, and Resnick 1996; Putman and Borko 2000).

OVERVIEW

Informed largely by recent research on teacher cognition (Borg 2003; Freeman 2002; Woods 1996), L2 teacher educators have come to recognize that the normative ways of acting and interacting and the values, assumptions, and attitudes that are embedded in the classrooms where teachers were once students – in the teacher education programs where they received their professional credentialing and in the schools where they now work as professional teachers – shape the complex ways in which teachers think about themselves, their students, the activities of teaching, and the teaching–learning process. L2 teacher educators have come to recognize teacher learning as socially negotiated and contingent on knowledge of self, students, subject matter, curricula, and setting. And L2 teacher educators have begun to conceptualize L2 teachers as users and creators of legitimate forms of knowledge who make decisions about how best to teach their L2 students within complex socially, culturally, and historically situated contexts. L2 teacher education programs no longer view L2 teaching as a matter of simply translating theories of second language acquisition (SLA) into effective instructional practices, but as a dialogic process of coconstructing knowledge that is situated in and emerges out of participation in particular sociocultural practices and contexts.