This chapter offers a detailed description of important similarities and shared features among the eight teacher participants in the case study, discussing these commonalities as both a ‘quintain’ (Stake, 2006) and a ‘prototype’ (Sternberg & Horvath, 1995) of Indian secondary teacher expertise, offering extensive extracts from lessons and interviews to do so. It covers the participant teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning, their interpersonal practices, their languaging practices, how they managed their curriculum, prepared resources and planned lessons before offering a detailed description of aspects of their classroom practice, including lesson structuring, negotiation and improvisation, whole class teaching, learner-independent activities, teacher active monitoring of learners, assessment and feedback practices. Evidence is also provided on commonalities concerning their knowledge base, reflective practices and professionalism. The chapter closes by offering a number of brief examples that serve to relate the practices and cognition of these teachers to the contextual constraints, challenges and affordances typically experienced by teachers working in the global South.

This chapter offers a detailed ethnographic description of one of the participant teachers in the study as a concrete example of how teacher expertise may manifest itself in one of the many challenging contexts frequently found in the global South. It begins by summarising key features of her contexts and the challenges she faced in her work, also offering an overview of her personal background and her beliefs about teaching and learning. The chapter then discusses her interpersonal practices (relationships with learners) and her languaging practices – the complex ways in which she and her learners made use of resources from varied languages in the classroom. After this, I discuss how she managed curriculum content, developed resources and planned lessons before offering a detailed account of her classroom practices – how she structured lessons, balanced between whole class and learner-independent activities and offered individual support to learners in large classes. It also offers an account of her knowledge, reflection and professionalism, and closes with brief comparison of her expertise with the findings of prior expertise research, identifying both important similarities and insightful differences. Numerous lesson and interview extracts are provided to support the discussion and claims made.

This chapter approaches the implementation of task-based language teaching (TBLT) in the second language classroom as a task for teachers. As the available research into change management and educational innovation indicates, there are many factors that potentially impact on teachers’ willingness and competence to put TBLT principles to practice. Studies into the implementation of TBLT suggest that, amongst others, teachers need to be granted autonomy to give personal meaning to TBLT and link it to their local context. In addition, they need time, sustained and system-wide assistance (from policy-makers, coursebook developers and teacher educators), and the support of their colleagues and principals to make their use of tasks truly rewarding for themselves and for their students’ language development.

To highlight the significant implications of L2 fluency research for language teaching, this chapter is dedicated to four aspects of L2 teaching practice: L2 policy documents, L2 textbooks, classroom practice and teacher cognition. This chapter aims to provide an analysis of how fluency is represented in each of these four aspects, and in what ways fluency research can help practitioners in these areas with everyday practices. After presenting a background to the role of fluency in L2 pedagogy, examples of L2 policy documents, e.g. the UK curriculum for teaching Modern Foreign Languages will be evaluated. We then provide a summary of research examining fluency in L2 textbooks, and discuss teaching activities that are reported as central to promoting fluency in the L2 classroom. Teacher understanding of fluency and the impact it has on promoting fluency in the language classroom will also be discussed.