English has always occupied a key position in China's education. The quality of English education depends largely on the quality of the English teaching force. Improving the overall quality of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) teachers entails advancing both their teaching and research competence. This study, with its focus on…

The aim of this study is to explore teachers' attitudes towards the shift to English as a medium of instruction in Qatari Independent schools. It focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of this approach for teachers and students, and the challenges they face in the process of its implementation. Data for the study were collected by means…

During the most recent educational reform in Estonia, a new National Curriculum was introduced in 2010 providing new guidelines for education generally and foreign languages specifically. To investigate the understanding that an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher has about professional teaching and whether it matches the principles of the…

Focusing on the working community, this article concentrates on the newly qualified foreign language teachers' (NQT) experiences and on factors that promoted or prevented the development of professional expertise at the outset of their working life. It draws on a qualitative longitudinal study conducted at the University of Jyväskylä,…

During 2009, three alternative teacher retraining programs in English as a Foreign Language, mathematics and biology were launched for the first time in one of Israel's largest teacher education colleges. The programs, which offered varied economic incentives to participants, were initiated by the state owing to shortages of teachers in these…

Motivated by the scarcity of research that examines the impact of teacher beliefs on their actual practices in Vietnam, this study investigated the relationship between teachers' beliefs about quality questions and their questioning behaviours in terms of questioning purposes, content focus, students' cognitive level, wording and syntax.…

This study reports the impact of different cultural values on the teacher education of Chinese teacher trainees. By examining their perceptions of the effectiveness of teaching practice feedback, the study uses Hofstede's dimension of "individualism" (IDV) to explore the "culture bumps" which may occur between teacher…

This study described the application of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) in a graduate-level teacher education course to guide teacher candidates' interactions with culturally and linguistically diverse student populations. Through the process of "Discover," "Dream," "Design," and "Delivery," teacher…

This study focuses on the interface between bidialectism and bilingualism and provides empirical support for the call for language educators to be trained in issues relating to linguistic variation. Drawing on the sociolinguistic setting of Cyprus, the study investigates the linguistic behaviour of bidialectal teachers in the English…

This paper reports the results of a qualitative study that examined the experiences of six preservice English language teachers in Hong Kong as they prepared for, engaged in, and reflected upon a compulsory research project during the final year of their Bachelor of Education degree program. Drawing upon in-depth interviews and using methods of…

This paper explores the authors' experiences as an early career teacher educator and English-language instructor in an English-medium university in Turkey. The theoretical framework shaping their collaboration draws upon a narrative view of teacher knowledge as an embodiment of teachers' experiences in schools in close relationship with their…

Chongqing University, as one of the experimental universities in China, has implemented computer-assisted language learning to support and practice learner autonomy since 2003. But in 2006, as a Visiting Fellow from Chongqing at the University of Leeds, the author noted pedagogical differences in promoting learner autonomy of language teaching…

This paper reports partial findings of a qualitative interpretive study of female secondary school English language teachers' perceptions of curriculum change in the United Arab Emirates. The sample consisted of 16 female teachers in three secondary schools who had experience teaching the former and the current English language curricula. Data…

This article addresses the challenges that non-native English-speaking teacher trainees face as they begin teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) in Western, English-speaking countries. Despite a great deal of training, non-native speaker teachers may be viewed as inadequate language teachers because they often lack native speaker competence…

In terms of education, e-mail has cemented its importance, as well as its status, as the overarching Internet tool. Specifically in the research of teacher education and teacher development, e-mails have been found to be empowering teachers' collaborative and networking practices. Such use of e-mails stimulates and refreshes teachers' professional…