This study seeks to understand from the perspective of its participants the extent to which a year-long structured, state-level peer mentorship program for world language educators provides benefits, focusing on how involvement impacts their classroom practices and professional development. Research questions explore the specific advantages gained…

This article reports the impact of an exploratory action research (EAR) project on developing teachers' action research competencies. Through various face-to-face and online activities, the project facilitated four English language teachers to conduct EAR in their teaching contexts. Qualitative data were collected through reflective journals and…

In the most general sense, mentoring is defined as the assistance more experienced teachers give to less experienced, generally novice teachers. Teacher mentoring programs have been long believed to assist novice teachers professionally in several ways. However, not much is known about how mentors perceive their experience within mentoring in…

With the goal to effectively produce a cadre of trained and ready foreign language (FL) teachers, the academic debate is not only focused on what content knowledge and skills the teacher needs, but also on how to best deliver teacher training in order to acquire such knowledge and skills (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017). Hence, it is particularly…

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) provide digital learning spaces for individualized professional development that may create opportunities in teacher education and support language teachers. Language teachers need continuous professional development to develop their digital literacies, and further research is essential to investigate new…

This article provides an overview of what is considered best practice in professional development in English language teaching by researchers and professional bodies. It then presents a research project investigating how satisfied English language teachers are with their own PD. The qualitative study involved a background survey of 92 teachers and…

Undertaking a Virtual Exchange (VE) project for the first time is supported by introductory online training and mentoring offered through the European Commission's Erasmus+ programme, and can be a source of teacher Professional Development (PD). This study based on Exploratory Practice (EP) describes aspects of the planning and implementation of…

Teachers in a new school setting tend to display lower teacher efficacy, which negatively affects teaching performance and student learning. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine the perceptions of teacher efficacy in pre-service teachers and explore key factors influencing the perceptions as a result of pre-service training.…

Reflective Teaching as a relatively new approach toward teaching and education can be traced back to Dewey's (1933) assertion of reflective action. To date, methodologies remain almost recursive. Arguably, the modality of written genres may tempt the teachers to produce cursory reflective writings. This exploratory paper presents the sorts of…

Reflecting simply put is the act of thinking about something while seeking a deeper level of understanding. Reflective practice is applying this thinking systematically by making questions, collecting data, and analysing it in order, not to prove something, but to comprehend and act upon reality. It is also an ongoing process that involves…

Despite the push for fostering reflective practices in teacher education in the last 20 years, true reflection remains rare (Farr, 2011). Based on a detailed analysis of four mentor-teacher meetings in a graduate TESOL program, I show how specific mentor practices generate teacher reflection without explicit solicitations. Findings of this study…

Based on appreciative inquiry and threshold concepts from an intercultural learning perspective, the article makes insights into the constructivist social learning practice of Estonian language learning amongst Russian-speaking teachers in Estonia. The application of educational action research methodology, more specifically that of Bridget…

Professional development is an ongoing process, one that evolves as teachers assess and reexamine their teaching beliefs and practices. This article highlights some reasons for teachers to pursue professional development. It also suggests techniques that help teachers feel empowered and motivated in their English language classrooms. She includes…

Educational researchers have recently suggested that Schon's influential model of the "reflective practitioner" lacks a prospective, or future, dimension. In this study, we examine instances of future-oriented talk produced by novice English as-a-second-language (ESL) teachers during mentoring meetings in one North American university…

Reviews strategies for helping prepare preservice and inservice English-language and content-area teachers to help students to function in English-as-a-Second/Foreign-Language classrooms in elementary, secondary, and tertiary educational contexts around the world. Strategies are drawn from three models of teacher development: craft or training,…