INTRODUCTION

In recent years, the aims and means of L2 teacher education have been questioned, and it is perhaps fair to say that the profession has undergone – and is still undergoing – a paradigm shift of sorts. Traditional, transmission-oriented approaches persist in some pockets of the world (Poynor 2005), although many teacher educators appear to have converged in their emphasis on reflective practice as a means of promoting the autonomous skills of novice teachers (Richards and Farrell 2005; Richards and Lockhart 1994; Schön 1987; Waters 2005; see also Burton, Chapter 30). Contemporary teacher preparation likewise emphasizes the cultivation of diverse kinds of teaching expertise (Berliner 1995; Borg 2005; Tsui 2003; see also Tsui, Chapter 19), as well as the social construction of knowledge for teaching (Hawkins 2004; Franson and Holliday this volume; Williams 1996). This transformation has unquestionably yielded positive results, and although the aims of reflective, socioculturally grounded practice have taken teacher preparation in a productive direction, the methods by which teacher education might achieve these aims remain somewhat underdefined (Freeman 1996b; Tarone and Allwright 2005; Tsui 2003).

SCOPE AND DEFINITIONS

This chapter examines the challenge of how teacher education might systematically apprentice newcomers to language teaching (LT) in a discourse-based framework. A useful means of engaging in such apprenticeship is to view LT as a diverse community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991), defined by Wenger (1998) as “a kind of community created over time by the sustained pursuit of a shared enterprise.” In a community of practice, learning unfolds collectively, resulting in “practices that reflect both the pursuit of our enterprises and the attendant social relations” (p. 45). To undertake this collective learning, I propose a socioliterate approach to teacher preparation, in which novice teachers are guided toward utilizing and reproducing the field’s discourse(s), including formalized means of knowledge construction and written communication (Hedgcock 2002; cf. Johns 1997). To illustrate how a socioliterate model might help teacher education bring newcomers into the LT discourse, this chapter first surveys socioliterate principles and then explores LT practices that support the appropriation of the profession’s discourse conventions.