This chapter begins by identifying Sternberg and Horvath’s (1995) ‘expert teacher prototype’ as an appropriate, flexible framework for researching and describing teacher expertise. The framework serves as a means to identify the ‘family resemblances’ among expert teachers rather than as a checklist of necessary and sufficient features. The chapter then reviews previously used criteria for identifying teachers for expertise studies, with particular attention to Palmer et al.’s (2005) review of these. The majority of the chapter is devoted to reporting the findings of a comprehensive systematic literature reviews of prior empirical research into teacher expertise, identifying robust findings from studies investigating six aspects of teacher expertise: the knowledge base, cognitive processes, beliefs, personal attributes, professionalism and pedagogic practices of expert teachers. The chapter then discusses what is missing from this expert teacher prototype as researched to date, identifying particularly the strong Northern bias in this research and why this is problematic. It reports briefly on the only detailed study found that researched expert teachers in a Southern context (Toraskar, 2015), which, due to the methodological difficulties the author encountered, is of limited use only.

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 reviews the contribution of the learning sciences to teacher learning research, with particular consideration of how cognitive, sociocognitive, sociocultural, and improvement-focused perspectives extend teacher learning research. Learning scientists study all phases of teacher learning, including preservice education (before becoming a teacher), the first few years of teaching, and ongoing mastery throughout the career. Research often focuses on teaching practices – what teachers do in the classroom and how they move from novice to expert performance. Teacher learning can be supported through collaboration with other teachers in a professional learning community (PLC); through coaching and mentoring; through videos of expert teaching practice; and through educative curriculum materials.

This case study describes the implementation of a task-based teacher training program for novice English teachers at a network of bilingual schools in Honduras. Teachers’ experiences in the training and implementation of teacher-designed TBLT lessons were examined through written reflections, interviews and video-recorded classroom observations. Findings demonstrated variability in TBLT implementation that was connected with teachers’ training experiences. Teachers highlighted the utility of the student-centered, task-based nature of the training but took issue with the lack of concrete resources provided. The findings have implications for language teachers, teacher trainers, and administrators in similar language programs worldwide.

The current chapter focuses on two main stakeholders of corrective feedback: teachers and learners, and it discusses whether and how teachers’ and learners’ beliefs or attitudes toward corrective feedback impact the effectiveness of corrective feedback. Previous research on both oral and written corrective feedback is reviewed. In terms of teachers’ beliefs of corrective feedback and their feedback practices, some research findings showed that teachers’ beliefs are not always in line with their actual classroom practices related to the use of different types of oral corrective feedback. Learners’ beliefs about the effectiveness of corrective feedback, particularly written corrective feedback, were found to be an important factor of learner engagement with corrective feedback. Recent corrective feedback research claims that teacher and learner beliefs are not static. Accordingly, the current literature review shows methodological changes over time, capturing the situational and dynamic patterns of learners’ and teachers’ beliefs about corrective feedback. The overall findings suggest that teachers’ and learners’ beliefs about CF are multifaceted and could be impacted by various contextual factors.

This chapter seeks to evaluate how student users of English are viewed beyond the English-as-school-subject curriculum, both in and out of classrooms. In particular, it exposes some of the tangible effects of ontologies of English in the education context, with important implications for education policy. Despite extensive scholarly work in Applied Linguistics offering positive reconceptualisations of language use in a variety of approaches, such as World Englishes, English as a Lingua Franca, and translanguaging (e.g. Creese and Blackledge, 2010; Hornberger and Link, 2012; García and Wei, 2014; García and Kleyn, 2016), the notion of a ‘target’ for the learning and teaching of ‘good English’ for most monolingual mainstream teachers in the United Kingdom remains based on the norms of Standard English, or N-English (to adopt the categorisation terminology proposed by Hall, this volume). For more discussion on the nature of linguistic norms, see Harder (this volume). In this chapter, I show how the presentation of Standard English as the ideal, on the assumption that it is “the language we have in common” (DES, 1988, p. 14), alienates not just multilingual learners of English but also many school children who would regard themselves as first-language English speakers.

This chapter aims to engage with wider discussions in this volume regarding ontologies of English and how language can be productively conceptualized by English teachers, learners/users, and other stakeholders. As indicated by the title, the work is intended to make a specific contribution towards uncovering complexity in ontologies of language that do not map cleanly onto dichotomies such as ‘monolithic versus plurilithic’ (Hall, 2013), ‘difference versus deficit’, or ‘standards-based versus intelligibility-based’. As also indicated, these ontological discussions are framed by a study carried out in a lingua franca context of pedagogy and usage, where (1) Japanese voluntary workers use English as a Lingua Franca to communicate with local interlocutors in diverse global locations and (2) an English language course is taken by these volunteers prior to their departure from Japan that is specifically designed to facilitate that communication. Further details on this context are provided in the following section before the focus returns to conceptions of English.