Language Teacher Education for a Global Society

The field of second/foreign language teacher education is calling out for a coherent and comprehensive framework for teacher preparation in these times of accelerating economic, cultural, and educational globalization. Responding to this call, this book introduces a state-of-the-art model for developing prospective and practicing teachers into strategic thinkers, exploratory researchers, and transformative teachers. The model includes five modules: Knowing, Analyzing, Recognizing, Doing, and Seeing (KARDS). Its goal is to help teachers understand:

• how to build a viable professional, personal and procedural knowledge-base,
• how to analyze learner needs, motivation and autonomy,
• how to recognize their own identities, beliefs and values,
• how to do teaching, theorizing and dialogizing, and
• how to see their own teaching acts from learner, teacher, and observer perspectives.

Providing a scaffold for building a holistic understanding of what happens in the language classroom, this model eventually enables teachers to theorize what they practice and practice what they theorize. With its strong scholarly foundation and its supporting reflective tasks and exploratory projects, this book is immensely useful for students, practicing teachers, teacher educators, and educational researchers who are interested in exploring the complexity of language teacher education.

About the Author

B. Kumaravadivelu is Professor, Department of Linguistics and Language Development, San Jose State University.