The Republic of Estonia as a typical country in transition is going through major changes in educational thinking. Global and European educational trends, together with local changes, the most important being a new state system, have resulted in changes in the concept of professional foreign language (FL) teaching. Common ground among various factors has to be formed in order to develop FL teacher professionalism in Estonia. In this article some normative and theoretical assumptions about professional FL teaching are explored, and an overview of research on perceptions of the professional FL teacher by the two major stakeholder groups--principals and students--is given. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)