Mindful L2 Teacher Education
A Sociocultural Perspective on Cultivating Teachers' Professional Development
ESL & Applied Linguistics Professional Series

Taking a Vygotskian sociocultural stance, this book demonstrates the meaningful role that L2 teacher educators and L2 teacher education play in the professional development of L2 teachers through systematic, intentional, goal-directed, theorized L2 teacher education pedagogy. The message is resoundingly clear: Teacher education matters! It empirically documents the ways in which engagement in the practices of L2 teacher education shape how teachers come to think about and enact their teaching within the sociocultural contexts of their learning-to-teach experiences. Providing an insider?s look at L2 teacher education pedagogy, it offers a close up look at teacher educators who are skilled at moving L2 teachers toward more theoretically and pedagogically sound instructional practices and greater levels of professional expertise.

First, the theoretical foundation and educational rationale for exploring what happens inside the practices of L2 teacher education are established. These theoretical concepts are then used to conduct microgenetic analyses of the moment-to-moment, asynchronous, and at-a-distance dialogic interactions that take place in five distinct but sometimes overlapping practices that the authors have designed, repeatedly implemented, and subsequently collected data on in their own L2 teacher education programs. Responsive mediation is positioned as the nexus of mindful L2 teacher education and proposed as a psychological tool for teacher educators to both examine and inform the ways in which they design, enact, and assess the consequences of their own L2 teacher education pedagogy.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Notes on transcriptions

I. Laying the Foundation for Mindful L2 Teacher Education

Chapter 1: A Sociocultural Perspective on L2 Teacher Education

Chapter 2: Mediation in L2 Teacher Professional Development

II. Vygotsky and Vygotskian-Inspired Theoretical Concepts that Inform Responsive Mediation

Chapter 3: Obuchenie, Perezhivanie, and Growth Points

Chapter 4: Interthinking, the Intermental Developmental Zone, and Sociocultural Discourse Analysis

III. Exploring Responsive Mediation in L2 Teacher Development

Chapter 5: Re-conceptualizing Engineering Student Participation

Chapter 6: Reconciling One’s Teaching Personae

Chapter 7: Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Chapter 8: Re-imagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity

Chapter 9: Conceptualizing Teaching In/Through Reflecting on Teaching

IV. Mindful L2 Teacher Education

Chapter 10: Responsive Mediation: The Nexus of Mindful L2 Teacher Education

Index

Karen E. Johnson is Kirby Professor in Language Learning and Applied Linguistics, The Pennsylvania State University, USA.

Paula R. Golombek is Clinical Associate Professor, Linguistics, University of Florida, USA.