5.1.1. Responsibilities

Characterized as ‘conscientious’ (Vethamani, Reference Vethamani2011, p. 103) and even ‘self-sacrificing’ (Yan et al., Reference Yan, He, Guo and Wang2020, p. 7), the language teacher educators in the five studies were expected to take on five types of responsibilities, entailing a multitude of tasks such as classroom teaching, practicum supervision, academic research, and program management (see Table 3). Such a wide scope of work required the teacher educators to socialize with various stakeholders including pre- and in-service teachers, school leaders, and educational authorities, while it also placed a new demand on them – that is, seeking continuous learning individually and collaboratively – in order to enhance their professional competence and fulfill their responsibilities.

Table 3.

Language teacher educators’ responsibilities

5.1.2. Challenges

While engaging in the various types of work can be intellectually stimulating and emotionally rewarding (e.g., gaining a sense of connection with student teachers) (e.g., Çelik, Reference Çelik2012), it can also pose challenges to language teacher educators at personal, interpersonal, and institutional levels. Table 4 presents a summary of the challenges reported by the participants in the five studies reviewed in Section 5.1.

Table 4.

Language teacher educators’ challenges

It is interesting to note that while language teacher educators are generally believed to be pedagogical experts with a high level of language proficiency, some of them, as reported by Yan et al. (Reference Yan, He, Guo and Wang2020), might still feel inadequate in their own language use and teaching as language is alive and keeps changing. This also reflects the dynamic and shifting nature of English as a lingua franca, which requires language teacher educators to constantly update and refine their linguistic and pedagogical knowledge (Smith, Reference Smith2016). However, their pursuit for continuous learning in teacher education was disrupted by different contextual obstacles, including a lack of opportunities for professional training and support. This was particularly problematic for novice teacher educators who just entered the profession of teacher education in university contexts (Çelik, Reference Çelik2012; Yuan & Lee, Reference Yuan and Lee2014). Most of them had to become self-reliant in an isolating and competitive work culture to explore what it meant to be a language teacher educator. More seriously, in the face of the prevailing ‘publish-or-perish’ system, many language teacher educators as suggested by the studies were compelled to direct their attention to publishing in order to meet the institutional demands, while they might be constrained by their inadequate research competence (see Section 5.2.3 for a detailed review of language teacher educators’ research and publishing). This finding resonates with the notion of ‘fundamental dualism’ (Murray et al., Reference Murray, Swennen, Shagrir, Swennen and van der Klink2009, p. 30) as observed in general teacher education, denoting that teacher educators are embroiled in a tug of war between their practical commitment towards classroom teaching and the world of academic research that emphasizes knowledge discovery and theory building. How to navigate and balance such potentially conflicting demands requires their reflective thinking and practical knowledge, which constitute a key part of language teacher educators’ quality, as discussed below.

5.1.3. Quality

In TESOL, the quality of language teacher educators seems to be an overlooked issue as only three studies were identified through our review (Al-Issa, Reference Al-Issa2017; Yuan & Hu, Reference Yuan and Hu2018; Zein & Haing, Reference Zein and Haing2017). This situation is in striking contrast to that of general teacher education, where systematic attention has been paid to the quality of teacher educators in the past decades. For instance, the Association of Teacher Educators in the United States has stipulated ‘Standards for Teacher Educators’ (revised and adapted between 2005 and 2008; see Houston, Reference Houston, Klecka, Odell, Houston and McBee2009) in terms of teaching, cultural competence, scholarship, professional development, collaboration, public advocacy, teacher education profession, and vision. In Europe, the Dutch Association of Teacher Educators has also developed its own standards, shedding light on five necessary competency areas for teacher educators, including content competencies, pedagogical competencies, organizational competencies, group dynamic and communicative competencies, and developmental and personal growth competencies (Koster & Dengerink, Reference Koster and Dengerink2001).

The three empirical studies (i.e., Al-Issa, Reference Al-Issa2017; Yuan & Hu, Reference Yuan and Hu2018; Zein & Haing, Reference Zein and Haing2017), drawing on views from different stakeholders including language teacher educators, student teachers, and school teachers, presented a host of key features that a high-quality language teacher educator is expected to possess in their everyday work. In Yuan and Hu's (Reference Yuan and Hu2018) study, the inductive analysis of focus group interviews with different groups of teachers in China revealed the multilayered nature of language teacher educators’ quality in terms of their rich content and pedagogical knowledge, vision (i.e., critical insights about the direction of language education), as well as social and emotional competence (e.g., connecting with student teachers). Similar results were observed in Al-Issa (Reference Al-Issa2017), whose findings underscored the ‘empowering’ (p. 9) attribute of language teacher educators in attending to the cognitive and affective needs of student teachers. More crucially, their willingness and abilities to push the boundaries and promote social justice were also considered essential in helping student teachers become informed change agents in language classrooms. While a pedagogy focus was equally evident in Zein and Haing's (Reference Zein and Haing2017) research, their findings further reveal the importance of ‘qualifications’ and ‘experiences’ in defining quality, credible language teacher educators. In terms of ‘qualifications’, the study highlighted that language teacher educators must exhibit a mastery of the subject (i.e., English) they are teaching with a relevant academic background (e.g., TESOL or Applied Linguistics). As for ‘experiences’, the study specified that language teacher educators should be equipped with experience of language teaching, which enabled them to identify what pedagogical approaches and techniques could work well with language learners in authentic classroom situations.

Taken together, the crucial attributes of language teacher educators revealed by the three aforementioned studies share great similarities (e.g., in terms of subject and pedagogical knowledge, professional vision, and classroom experiences) with the professional standards developed by the teacher educator associations. However, given the small number of studies with relatively limited sample sizes, the results may not be able to shed full light on what constitutes a high-quality language teacher educator. In addition, since the standards reviewed above focus on teacher educators in general, it is uncertain whether they are equally applicable to EFL teacher educators in different geographical contexts, and whether subject-specific standards are needed in line with their practices in educating EFL teachers. These issues still warrant further attention in the field of second language teacher education.

5.2.1. Teaching

Given language teacher educators’ primary role as teachers of language teachers, considerable attention has been paid to their classroom practice. In terms of teaching content, this bulk of studies looked into how teacher educators addressed critical issues regarding language teaching pedagogy (Farías & Véliz, Reference Farías and Véliz2019), critical thinking (Veliz & Veliz-Campos, Reference Veliz and Veliz-Campos2019), as well as language proficiency and culture (Banegas, Reference Banegas2020b; Smith, Reference Smith2016). How to instruct language teachers and organize their learning – LTE pedagogy – has also been a major area of research in the field, shedding light on a wide range of teaching strategies and tasks employed by language teacher educators with an aim to promote language teachers’ linguistic competence and pedagogical knowledge as well as stimulate their reflective and agentive thinking. As shown in Table 5, five major strategies were identified to capture the various pedagogical dimensions of language teacher educators’ classroom practice.

Table 5.

Teaching approaches/strategies employed by language teacher educators

Three studies (Kaur, Reference Kaur2015; Peercy, Reference Peercy2014; Vetere, Reference Vetere2020) described how language teacher educators managed to deliver abstract content knowledge in teacher education classrooms. By selecting appropriate materials with necessary modification and drawing on their own personal observations and stories, they tried to guide the teachers to discover the link between the course content and the classroom reality. One notable example is Kaur (Reference Kaur2015), in which the teacher educator provided the in-service teachers with a set of instructional ground rules for writing instruction. Such rules thus served as a frame of reference, which informed the teachers’ exploration and experimentation in their teaching of writing. On the other hand, while Vetere (Reference Vetere2020) made attempts to introduce to a student teacher an innovative teaching method (i.e., drama-based instruction) with reference to his own experiences and reflections, he came to realize that his input was not successfully picked up by the student teacher as reflected in her teaching performance. Thus, he critiqued the traditional mode of knowledge transmission in teacher education classrooms, for it failed to mirror the communicative, task-based approach advocated by language teacher educators.

Indeed, given that learning to teach is a social, experiential process of meaning negotiation and sense-making, language teacher educators need to ‘practice what they preach’ by helping language teachers approach the complexities of language teaching through direct observation, experimentation, and reflections. This view gives rise to the teaching strategy of modelling as reported in Lucero and Scalante-Morales (Reference Lucero and Scalante-Morales2018), Peercy (Reference Peercy2014), as well as Yuan (Reference Yuan2018). The findings of the three studies suggest that language teachers are strongly susceptible to language teacher educators’ modelling practice, which can directly or indirectly shape the ways they perceive and engage in classroom teaching. Yuan (Reference Yuan2018), drawing on data from interviews and class observation, further illustrated three different patterns of modelling (i.e., explicit, implicit, and incidental) provided by a language teacher educator in Hong Kong. Explicit modelling can immerse student teachers in direct experiences with the important pedagogical principles and practice enacted by the teacher educator, who can provide follow-up justification, explanation, and reflection to help student teachers dissect and internalize such authentic experience. In contrast to explicit modeling, Implicit modelling is embedded in language teacher educators’ daily practice, where they demonstrate the attributes of an effective language lesson in delivering knowledge, organizing activities, asking questions, giving feedback, and so on. Incidental modelling, which tends to be unpredictable and spontaneous, arises from teacher educators’ instant decision-making and actions in practice. It allows teacher educators to demonstrate ‘how to make use of unexpected classroom situations and create learning experiences’ (Yuan, Reference Yuan2018, p. 422) for language learners.

Dialogic mediation, which is often embedded in various reflective activities (e.g., joint lesson planning, micro-teaching, and group reflection), functions as another important strategy in LTE classrooms. Employing a mixed method research design, Zolghadri et al. (Reference Zolghadri, Atai and Babaii2019) showed how language teacher educators used questioning (i.e., a combination of display and referential questions) to facilitate student teachers’ conceptualization of course content. Johnson and Dellagnelo (Reference Johnson and Dellagnelo2013) examined the teaching of a teacher educator as she worked with a team of novice teachers to help them take up and use a set of pedagogical tools (e.g., instructional paraphrasing and orienting) in language instruction. One particularly useful activity was ‘practice teach’, in which the student teachers individually constructed a lesson plan and taught it in front of the team members, who regularly halted the instruction to ask questions, provide feedback, and make suggestions. Such dialogic interactions led to a mediational space, where the student teachers could seek clarification, exchange views, and propose new ideas, while the teacher educator could elaborate on the pedagogical tools with concrete suggestions. In another paper contributed by Johnson (Reference Johnson2015), she illustrated how dialogic mediation can manifest through conscious efforts (e.g., providing a rationale or inserting an academic definition in discussion) made by the teacher educator in guiding her student teachers to learn how to teach 'parallel structure' in language classrooms. In Yuan and Yang's (Reference Yuan and Yang2020a) study, the language teacher educator used some translanguaging acts – that is, the frequent switch between academic discourse and everyday discourse – to help his student teachers unpack the nuances and intricacy of language teaching. Specifically, not only did he draw on everyday discourse (e.g., narratives) to explain difficult concepts, but he also elicited the student teachers’ personal sharing about certain academic topics and then reframed their ideas in light of the academic theories he had introduced. This translanguaging act thus mediated student teachers’ cognitive processing of the academic concepts, contributing to their personalized theory about language teaching.

Our review has also identified some strategies adopted by language teacher educators to cater for student teachers’ emotional needs. At the task level, Kaur (Reference Kaur2015) presented how he helped a group of language teachers cope with negative feelings of uncertainty and anxiety when innovating their practice of teaching writing. He emphasized the importance of ‘drafting teacher participation’ (p. 381) by breaking a complex task down into manageable parts with sub-goals. As the teachers started small with realistic goals in mind, they became less hesitant and anxious in implementing new ideas in their classrooms. At the discourse level, Johnson and Dellagnelo (Reference Johnson and Dellagnelo2013) showcased how a teacher educator verbally acknowledged the student teachers’ ideas and efforts, followed by guided questions and elaboration to shape their contribution and stimulate their thinking. Such techniques mitigated the student teachers’ unease and frustrations, thereby opening up their minds for new input and critique. Further, student teachers’ first language and the sharing of personal anecdotes and jokes were used to create an emotionally relaxing and safe environment, as reported by the teacher educator in Yuan and Yang's (Reference Yuan and Yang2020a) study.

Related to the emotional dimension of language teacher educators’ pedagogical practice is an emphasis on ‘community building’, which seeks to promote collaborative engagement and mutual learning in teacher education classrooms. Peercy (Reference Peercy2014), for instance, detailed her course design that involved opportunities for student teachers ‘to share lessons they were designing at various stages of planning, to teach them to peers, and to receive peer feedback’ (p. 154). Kaur (Reference Kaur2015) also reported the continuous and intense interactions between a teacher educator and language teachers through a series of practical tasks, which encompassed idea exchange and brainstorming about writing instruction, simulated writing lessons, actual lesson design and implementation, as well as post-lesson discussion. Such practices can bring language teacher educators and teachers together to form a professional learning community in classroom settings. As the community emerges and develops, different ideas, resources, and practices may be introduced and synergized, thus exerting a collective impact on individual members’ professional learning in various ways.

With the advancement of educational technology and situated in the era of post COVID-19 pandemic, it has become imperative for language teacher educators to plan, organize, and deliver teacher education courses in a virtual environment. Several studies (Rubadeau, Reference Rubadeau2018; Solihati & Mulyono, Reference Solihati and Mulyono2017) have been identified with a direct focus on language teacher educators’ engagement with educational technology in educating teachers. Based on the qualitative data from classroom observations, interviews, and reflections, their results show that the language teacher educators displayed a willingness to learn about new technologies and actively apply them in classroom teaching. However, a close analysis of the findings reveals that their technology use mainly stayed at the general pedagogical level (e.g., distributing learning resources, offering instant feedback, and promoting student participation) without examining how technology could work with other resources and tasks in a holistic and interconnected manner to promote effective teacher learning. Issues regarding the integration of technology into teacher education practice to illustrate abstract concepts, organize dialogic reflections, and model exemplary teaching practice have not been examined in depth in the current research literature (Green-Eneix & De Costa, Reference Green-Eneix, De Costa, Kayi-Aydar and Reinhardt2022). In view of the ongoing COVID 19 pandemic that has moved teaching and teacher education online across the globe, the exigencies of effective technology integration into teacher education practice do merit attention.

5.2.2. Practicum supervision

In addition to classroom teaching, language teacher educators also assume the role of ‘supervisor’ by offering clinical guidance and support to pre-service teachers during their teaching practicum in field schools. Teaching practicum has long been a widely researched topic in language teaching and teacher education, with a large bulk of studies (e.g., Farrell, Reference Farrell2008; Trent, Reference Trent2010) looking into student teachers’ cognitive engagement and socialization processes in complex school environments. Surprisingly, this line of inquiry has paid scant attention to the perspectives and practices of language teacher educators, with only seven empirical studies identified through our literature search.

The first two papers contributed by Ochieng’ Ong'ondo and Borg (Reference Ochieng’ Ong'ondo and Borg2011) and Sulistiyo et al. (Reference Sulistiyo, Mukminin, Rahman and Haryanto2017) painted a general and somehow grim picture about language teacher educators’ engagement in practicum supervision. As opposed to the expectations from many LTE programs that advocate a collaborative and sustained university-school partnership in supporting student teachers’ field learning (e.g., Barahona, Reference Barahona2015; Chan, Reference Chan2019), the teacher educators in the two studies had limited contact and communication with school-based mentors, and the supervision they provided for student teachers turned out to be brief, unstructured, and even superficial. As further probed by Ochieng’ Ong'ondo and Borg (Reference Ochieng’ Ong'ondo and Borg2011) through in-depth interviews, this could be partially attributed to the time constraints as the teacher educators faced a tight schedule to conduct multiple school visits. Additionally, a detailed analysis of the teacher educators’ class observation forms suggests that some participants lacked pedagogical knowledge about English language teaching, and therefore they merely commented on general issues such as classroom management.

In Arshavskaya (Reference Arshavskaya2014), Golombek (Reference Golombek2015), San Martín (Reference San Martín2018), and Vetere (Reference Vetere2020), a more nuanced, situated focus was adopted to explore how teacher educators engaged in dialogic interactions with student teachers during the teaching practicum. The four studies, informed by a socio-cultural perspective that foregrounds the power of mediation in shaping human cognition (Johnson, Reference Johnson2009; Vygotsky, Reference Vygotsky1978), exhibited various strategies adopted by the teacher educators to mediate their student teachers’ acquisition of new pedagogical concepts and reflections on their classroom practice. For example, San Martín's (Reference San Martín2018) study demonstrated two critical phases – that is, diagnosis and intervention – embedded in the post-lesson meetings between a teacher educator and a student teacher during the teaching practicum. As revealed in the findings, the diagnostic strategies, such as questioning and clarification check, informed and mediated the teacher educator's decisions and actions as to how much and what kind of support the student teacher required, thus speaking to the dialogic and negotiated nature of teacher learning.

As claimed by Vygotsky (Reference Vygotsky, Rieber and Carton1987), a socio-cultural perspective also highlights a dialectic unity of cognition and affect, which collaboratively shapes human learning through social interactions. This view was observed in Arshavskaya's (Reference Arshavskaya2014) study, in which the teacher educator attended to both cognitive (by providing concrete suggestions) and emotional challenges (by showing her understanding and approval) faced by the student teacher in a hybrid mode that combined dialogic blogging and face-to-face meetings. The intertwined relationship between cognition and emotion was further examined in Golombek's (Reference Golombek2015) self-inquiry, which detailed her emotional dissonance regarding her mediation of the reflection journals of a student teacher during an internship. The results sounded a note of caution against the culturally constructed notion of ‘classical professionalism’ (Hargreaves & Goodson, Reference Hargreaves, Goodson, Goodson and Hargreaves1996), which prescribes teachers to act as if they were impassive clinicians when interacting with students. The study stressed the need for language teacher educators to carefully and critically explore emotional dissonance brought forth by their own deeply held beliefs and previous lived experiences, and embrace such dissonance as catalyst for promoting emotional exchanges and meaning negotiation with student teachers.

Aligned with the previous section that depicts the use of educational technology and its associated multimodal resources in teacher education classrooms, technology can also be employed by language teacher educators in the teaching practicum, as documented in Baecher et al. (Reference Baecher, McCormack and Kung2014). Adopting a qualitative case study design, the paper reported on a collaborative reflective experience in which student teachers were required to video-record their classroom teaching and submit the videos to teacher educators for joint discussion and analysis. By (re)playing and viewing the videos together, the teacher educators drew student teachers’ attention to concrete instances of instruction with detailed prompting questions and feedback to stimulate student teachers’ critical reflection. However, some problems also arose in relation to student teachers’ complex (and even negative) feelings (e.g., unease, embarrassment, and defensiveness) in viewing and critiquing their own teaching videos. This finding speaks to the studies (e.g., Arshavskaya, Reference Arshavskaya2014) reviewed above, which urged language teachers to provide strategic mediation to help student teachers reflexively regulate and manage their emotions as an essential part of learning to teach (Wolff & De Costa, Reference Wolff and De Costa2017). On the other hand, as the study only drew on the teacher educators’ self-report data (interviews and written vignettes), it might not be able to account for the meaning negotiation process between the teacher educators and student teachers in the video-based reflection meetings, thus pointing to a direction for future research.

5.2.3. Research and publishing

Nowadays, research has become an inevitable part of language teacher educators’ professional work and development. Our review has identified five empirical studies that specially focused on language teacher educators’ research (i.e., Banegas, Reference Banegas2020b; Barkhuizen, Reference Barkhuizen2021b; Yuan, Reference Yuan2017a; Yuan & Mak, Reference Yuan and Mak2016; Yuan & Yang, Reference Yuan and Yang2020b). For example, Banegas (Reference Banegas2020b) conducted an action research (AR) study in his English-as-a-medium-of-instruction linguistics course taken by pre-service English teachers. Through ongoing data collection and analysis (i.e., a group interview and his own teaching artifacts and journals), Banegas gradually adjusted his teaching, which led to the student teachers’ improvement of their English language proficiency, comprehension of linguistics knowledge, and ability to link the acquired knowledge to their future teaching practice. In addition, Yuan and Mak's (Reference Yuan and Mak2016) study documented the collaborative action research (CAR) experience between three language teacher educators and school teachers in China. Although the teacher educators encountered various challenges in collaborating with the teachers (i.e., difficulties in orienting teachers towards research, teachers’ reliance, and sustainability of AR), they actively engaged the teachers in open communication to grant them more autonomy in AR and created opportunities for them to share their AR with the wider community of LTE.

Besides AR, self-study can serve as another powerful medium to promote the integration of research and practice in LTE. Employing different names such as self-study (Geursen et al., Reference Geursen, de Heer, Korthagen, Lunenberg and Zwart2010; Peercy, Reference Peercy2014; Peercy & Troyan, Reference Peercy and Troyan2017; Spiteri, Reference Spiteri2010), narratives (Peercy et al., Reference Peercy, Sharkey, Baecher, Motha and Varghese2019), autoethnography (Yazan, Reference Yazan2019), and reflective account or reflection-on-action (Solihati & Mulyono, Reference Solihati and Mulyono2017; Wyatt, Reference Wyatt2014), a group of language teacher educators investigated their own practice and the underlying beliefs and assumptions. Their critical self-examination has enhanced their understanding of language teaching and learning as well as their own identities in higher education. This line of inquiry is reviewed and analyzed in detail in Section 5.4.1, focusing on language teacher educators’ continuing development.

Language teacher educators’ research is not free from external constraints and challenges, as seen in Barkhuizen (Reference Barkhuizen2021b), Yuan (Reference Yuan2017a), and Yuan and Yang (Reference Yuan and Yang2020b). First, as residents of the higher education academe, they are influenced by the performance-based appraisal system of their university and thus need to meet the stringent requirements on their academic and research outputs. For example, Yuan and Yang (Reference Yuan and Yang2020b) found that the language teacher educators often had to spend more time on research than teaching, as forcefully explained by a participant that their contract renewal or promotion depended on ‘the number of SSCI publications and external grants’ they had (p. 203). Such a situation is particularly true for novice and mid-career language teacher educators who have not been granted a tenured position at their university.

Second, language teacher educators’ practice-based research (e.g., AR) may not be favored by the higher education academe, for it may not be regarded as rigorous research with generalizable findings. Barkhuizen's (Reference Barkhuizen2021b) study depicted the dilemma that a language teacher educator (i.e., Ana) encountered in research and publishing as she started doing a Ph.D. degree and later tried to secure an academic position at her university. Being an experienced teacher educator, Ana committed herself towards meaningful, practice-oriented research that could inform and improve teaching practice. However, to enter the university community, she had to meet the institutional standards, which prescribed the type of research, number of paper publications, and frequency of publications. Focusing on a novice EFL teacher educator's publishing experience, Yuan's (Reference Yuan2017a) narrative inquiry found that although many academic journals have claimed to publish research with an international perspective, a lot of them are still dominated by an Anglocentric ideology and practice. Therefore, research topics based in peripheral EFL contexts (e.g., Hong Kong), as the participant explained, were deemed irrelevant by some journal gatekeepers, rendering it difficult for language teacher educators’ research manuscripts to be accepted in international journals.

In response to such challenges, language teacher educators can exert self-agency by devising a variety of coping strategies to tackle the challenges as a few studies reported (Yuan, Reference Yuan2016; Yuan & Yang, Reference Yuan and Yang2020b). First, they can adopt concrete strategies to bridge the gap between academic and practice-based research, using one to inform the other. For example, the language teacher educators in Yuan and Yang (Reference Yuan and Yang2020b) employed the following strategies: (1) referring to relevant research literature when designing their courses for pre-service teachers, (2) conducting research on different practical topics in their classrooms to inform teaching and scholarship, and (3) writing textbooks and delivering workshops based on their practice-based research. Also, to address the challenge of writing and publishing in English and meeting the standards of the journal gatekeepers (e.g., reviewers and editors), the language teacher educator in Yuan (Reference Yuan2017a) exploited two practical strategies. One strategy was to enhance his research competence and academic writing skills by collaborating with experienced teacher educators. The other strategy for improving his academic writing skills was to seek help from language editors, learn from reviewers’ comments, and serve as a journal reviewer himself. Through learning by doing, he managed to publish practice-based research works in international journals to disseminate his research insights for language education.

Overall, the existing literature has done a solid job by generating valuable insights into language teacher educators’ classroom teaching, practicum supervision, and research and publishing. The myriad of demanding roles that language teacher educators need to play to some extent demands them to be ‘supermen/superwomen’, who are expected to possess not only a diverse set of competencies but also enduring passion and unwavering energy for their job. As will be detailed in Section 7.1, we argue against this ‘have-it-all’ mentality and propose humanizing language teacher educators as whole people. Our review also identifies a dearth of research in certain aspects of language teacher educators’ roles. In fact, language teacher educators’ professional engagement often extends to other important areas such as research student supervision, program management and reform, as well as community service (e.g., providing consultations and outreach support for local schools). Such forms of practice, however, have received scant attention in the current research. Our review reveals only one study conducted by Wyatt (Reference Wyatt2014), who shared his reflective account of supervising an in-service language teacher in conducting a research project. Since research has become an important component of LTE curricula owing to the continuing movement of teacher research in both general education and language education (Burns, Reference Burns2005; Richards, Reference Richards2008; Yuan & Burns, Reference Yuan and Burns2017), the under-investigated issue of how language teacher educators guide pre-service teachers to do research remains an important area for future research.

5.3.1. Language teacher educators’ beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes

In total, the review has identified 11 papers that provide insights into language teacher educators’ beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes about different dimensions of their professional work. Based in the higher education context of Hong Kong, Yuan's (Reference Yuan2017b) paper is probably the most comprehensive one as it depicts the general types of teaching beliefs held by two teacher educators regarding how English should be taught and learned, how English teachers learn to teach, as well as how teacher educators teach English teachers. While Yuan's study sheds light on the multiple dimensions of language teacher educators’ beliefs, one limitation is that it fails to capture the intricacy of how they perceive and engage with specific aspects of their daily work. As illustrated below, this gap has been addressed by other researchers with a diversity of foci.

Zein (Reference Zein2017), following a grounded theory approach, investigated the general teaching beliefs held by a group of language teacher educators about the need to develop student teachers’ linguistic proficiency (particularly pronunciation and accent), and foster their pedagogical competence in terms of textbook adaptation and materials analysis. However, the study was limited by the lack of in-depth analysis about the possible reasons behind such beliefs held by the teacher educators. In another study (Byrd et al., Reference Byrd, Hlas, Watzke and Valencia2011) that adopted a survey design, the foreign language teacher educators (around half with an ESL background) were depicted as strong advocates for the integration of culture into teacher education practice in the United States. The findings also indicated the strong influence of the curriculum guidelines (‘National Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21^st Century’) prescribed by the educational authority as an important external factor that contributed to the participants’ beliefs and practice about teaching culture in teacher education classrooms. In the mixed-method study conducted by Habibi et al. (Reference Habibi, Razak, Yusop and Mukminin2019), the analysis of questionnaire and interview data demonstrated a high level of appreciation toward an ICT component held by the teacher educators, who, on the other hand, reported a lack of confidence and competence to help student teachers develop ICT-based lessons. For example, while they had a firm belief about the usefulness of modeling as an instructional strategy to explicitly demonstrate the application of ICT in front of student teachers, they showed uncertainty and doubts owing to their self-perceived limited ICT competency in instruction. Recognizing such conflicting beliefs, the participants thus expressed the desire for continuous learning through peer collaboration in the future.

While the above-reviewed belief papers vary in their foci such as linguistic proficiency, culture, and ICT, it is interesting to note that a handful of studies (n = 6) have specifically examined language teachers’ attitudes and reflections about LTE curriculum reforms in higher education contexts. In Izadinia's (Reference Izadinia2012) study, the participants split into two camps, namely, a traditional, skill-based orientation versus a critical, transformative approach to preparing reflective and creative language teachers. Similarly, Yavuz and Zehir Topkaya's (Reference Yavuz and Zehir Topkaya2013) research revealed a divide in content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. To be specific, while some teacher educators emphasized language proficiency and content knowledge through the provision of linguistic-related courses in the revised curriculum, others advocated the training of teaching pedagogy in specific language skills (e.g., reading and writing).

The emphasis on linguistic proficiency and subject-matter knowledge (in relation to English linguistics and culture) in LTE curriculum building was also shared by the Iranian teacher educators in Gholami and Qurbanzada's (Reference Gholami and Qurbanzada2016) survey, which highlighted the need for student teachers to develop a high level of English proficiency (e.g., native-like pronunciation) in order to meet the market demands in their future job. These results thus reflected the potential influence of ‘native-speakerism’ (Holliday, Reference Holliday2006) on current LTE curricula enacted by language teacher educators with their individualized beliefs and values. As a deeply entrenched ideology which contradicts the multilingual and multicultural reality we are situated in, the notion of ‘native-speakerism’ should be critically examined by language teacher educators, who need to acknowledge the power of non-native English speaker teachers (NNESTs) and advocate an equitable, inclusive, and empowering approach to language teaching (De Costa et al., Reference De Costa, Green-Eneix and Li2021; Moussu & Llurda, Reference Moussu and Llurda2008). This, nonetheless, does not mean disregarding the focus on linguistic competence and content knowledge in preparing language teachers. As illustrated in Zein's (Reference Zein2015) research in Indonesia, the teacher educators embraced a balanced curriculum view, encompassing both a linguistic and practical component in their LTE program. In particular, some participants proposed a content-based approach in the process of learning to teach. In this way, student teachers can gradually enhance their language abilities while being exposed to content-based courses (in relation to English language culture, communication, and pedagogy), in which they can cultivate their subject matter knowledge and develop their critical thinking and teaching competence.

With an enhanced understanding about the complexities and dynamics involved in teacher learning, current LTE curricula have become increasingly diverse to meet student teachers’ multiple and shifting needs. As a result, some researchers have paid attention to language teacher educators’ beliefs towards different modes and approaches in LTE curricula. Knox (Reference Knox2017) reported an international survey about teacher educators’ perceptions about online LTE programs, which provided an alternative route for a large population of teacher candidates to enter the teaching profession. In general, the participants held a favorable attitude towards offering LTE by distance, pointing to the advantages including a culturally diverse cohort, self-driven learners and more opportunities for immediate practice of what student teachers learn. Meihami and Husseini's (Reference Meihami and Husseini2020) study investigated how teacher educators perceived an identity-oriented teacher education curriculum in Iran. Their results revealed a series of pedagogical strategies and tasks (e.g., reflective writing and action research) perceived by the teacher educators as facilitative to pre-service language teachers’ identity construction as ‘decision makers’ and ‘curriculum developers’ in their future contexts. Their research focus spoke to the pivotal role of identity as a reflective lens in guiding language teachers’ daily practice and continuous learning (Yazan, Reference Yazan2019).

Furthermore, some studies have identified the challenges perceived by language teacher educators during curriculum reforms. Banegas (Reference Banegas2016) reported his participants’ lack of awareness about the overarching curriculum formulated by the government in Argentina, as they mainly knew about the aims, content, and assessment practices of the courses they were expected to lead. The information gap resulted in a marginalized and invisible status, which prevented the participants from full engagement with the reform. In a similar vein, the participants from Yavuz and Zehir Toplaya (Reference Yavuz and Zehir Topkaya2013) shared their confusion and disrupted engagement as they received conflicting information from two important stakeholders of the Turkish LTE curriculum reform. These studies argued for the need to respect the voices of language teachers and teacher educators as the end users of LTE programs.

Notably, the majority of the papers (n = 5) have adopted a comparative perspective to explore teacher educators’ and their students’ views about their situated curricula. In other words, they collected data from the two parties to compare and contrast their beliefs about specific curriculum components and their subsequent implementation in different LTE programs. Such a research angle is commendable because it generates insights into the congruence and disparities between the intended (perceived by language teacher educators) and enacted teacher education curriculum (experienced by pre- and in-service language teachers), and provides practical implications on curriculum reform and transformation. That said, in addition to language teacher educators and teachers, it might also be interesting to take the views of other stakeholders (e.g., school management and students) into consideration.

5.3.2. Language teacher educators’ knowledge and expertise

Despite the popularity of research on language teachers’ professional knowledge and expertise, surprisingly only five studies have been dedicated to language teacher educators. In Iran, Moradkhani and his colleagues (Reference Moradkhani, Akbari, Samar and Kiany2013) made a meaningful attempt to identify the major categories of language teacher educators’ pedagogical knowledge. Relying on data from semi-structured interviews, they proposed a tentative knowledge model that comprised eight critical components, such as ‘knowledge of language and related disciplines’, ‘knowledge of ELT theories, skills, and techniques’, and ‘knowledge of context and social relations’, to name a few. In a follow-up study, Moradkhani (Reference Moradkhani2017) continued to validate this model through a questionnaire survey. By conducting an exploratory factor analysis of the collected data, the study indicated that the participants rated certain knowledge components (e.g., ‘knowledge of teacher education’ and ‘knowledge of ELT-related theories’) as highly relevant to their daily practice, whereas they seemed to downplay ‘knowledge of critical/moral issues’ in LTE. This finding, to a certain degree, contradicts previous research (e.g., Kohli, Reference Kohli2019) in mainstream education, which underscores the critical, emancipatory, and transformative power of teacher education. One limitation of the study is the lack of explanation about the teacher educators’ low ratings on this knowledge component (i.e., critical/moral issues) in relation to particular social, cultural, and political factors.

In the United States, Liu (Reference Liu2013) provided an ethnographic account of a language teacher educator's pedagogical knowledge and teaching practice. At the heart of the participant's knowledge base was his practice-based, experiential teaching approach, which he constantly applied in his teaching of language teachers. Considering that the course participants were all native English speakers who would teach non-native English learners after graduation, the teacher educator also provided detailed guidance to help them explicitly sense and analyze how English functions as a language for non-native speakers. This example thus revealed a strong sense of student-centeredness and contextual sensitivity embedded in his pedagogical knowledge as a teacher educator. Furthermore, as opposed to the Iranian teacher educators reported in Moradkhani (Reference Moradkhani2017), the participant in this study embraced a critical lens in his classroom practice, which allowed his students to interrogate, investigate, and understand complex issues related to culture, race, and ethnicity in TESOL. This may be explained by the context change because such issues have been an important subject of discussion and research in the United States (De Costa, Reference De Costa2021), and consequently they have been deemed as a vital part of language teacher educators’ pedagogical knowledge and practice.

The most comprehensive study on language teacher educators’ knowledge is Banegas (Reference Banegas2020a) who conducted interviews and developed an arts-based form instrument called significant circle that was used in the context of Argentina. Besides identifying and acknowledging the knowledge components (e.g., knowledge of ELT and knowledge of LTE pedagogy) that were deemed critical for language teacher educators to fulfill their multiple duties, his study took a further step to shed light on the funds of teacher educators’ knowledge at personal and community levels. Particularly noteworthy were the language teacher educators’ reflexive and critical dispositions, which cut across all types of knowledge and helped inform and guide their professional practice and knowledge construction.

Lastly, Asaba (Reference Asaba2018) focused on an experienced language teacher educator's expertise, which was manifested in his endeavor to provide useful learning resources, promote cooperative learning, and link theories and practice in his language pedagogy courses. One important attribute of his expertise was a strong reflective awareness, which guided him to engage in academic research and knowledge dissemination in response to the situated linguistic and socio-cultural reality. This suggests that language teacher educators’ expertise is organic, flexible, and adaptive, which is open to new input and changes through self-reflections and collaborative experiences. The study, however, was limited as it mostly depicted the behavioral traits that reflected the language teacher educator's expertise without offering a systematic analysis of its constituent components and their interrelationships. In addition, it lacked a process perspective to track and explore expertise transformation, which generated an unanswered question: how did the participant foster his expertise over time?

Overall, the five studies in this category have brought forth meaningful insights about the inner world of language teacher educators in terms of what they know, believe, and value. The final note we would like to make is the lack of attention to language teacher educators’ emotions in the existing literature. Among all the studies reviewed, only one (Golombek, Reference Golombek2015) explicitly explored the interplay between a language teacher educator's cognition and emotions, which became deeply integrated to inform her interactions with a student teacher during the teaching practicum. This study challenges the instrumental, technical view that places an overt emphasis on knowledge transmission and skill building, and stresses the importance of recognizing and embracing language teacher educators’ emotions as catalysts for stimulating meaning negotiation and construction in LTE. In line with the emotional turn in applied linguistics and TESOL (De Costa et al., Reference De Costa, Rawal, Li and de Dios Martínez Agudo2018; Richards, Reference Richards2020; White, Reference White and de Dios Martínez Agudo2018), emotions should also be brought to the forefront in language teacher educator research in the future.

5.4.1. Institutional programs and individual efforts for professional development

Perry and Boodt (Reference Perry and Boodt2019) looked into a government-funded professional development program for teacher educators operated by the Further Education and Skills section in England. The six-section program encompassed skills including observation, collaboration, curriculum design, feedback, technology, and reflection. Through surveys and interviews, the study shows that the 34 participants confirmed the need of such a program, which could give rise to a professional learning community for idea exchange and mutual support.

Apart from examining official programs, teacher educators’ individual efforts for seeking their continuing development have also been closely examined in diverse contexts. Drawing on the social theory of learning, Yuan (Reference Yuan2015) investigated the process in which three Chinese Ph.D. students learned to become teacher educators through teaching, collaboration, and research in China. In the process of socialized learning, the three potential teacher educators were given rich opportunities to observe experienced teacher educators’ classroom teaching, participate in university-school CAR projects, and conduct academic research that enriched their knowledge base about LTE. Despite having no previous teaching experience, the participants received cognitive and affective support from their supervisors and peers, which added fuel to their becoming teacher educators. Still in the context of China, but with practicing teacher educators, Liu (Reference Liu2019) focused on the micro-processes of teacher talk in a language teacher professional community. Through the detailed analysis of an excerpt on different understandings of ‘creativity’ from two teacher educators, his findings revealed how distributed tacit knowledge of individual teacher educators can be externalized and mobilized through interactions of teacher talk. The findings underlined the importance of the creation of a dialogic space for teachers and teacher educators to effectively negotiate and transform their tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge for collective professional development. Both studies confirm the need of dialogic and practice-based training for teacher educators and highlight the importance of a collaborative and supportive community when it comes to teacher educators’ sustained engagement and learning.

Adopting the approach of self-study, a number of scholars have also looked into the process and conditions of their own continuing development in specific work environments. In a collaborative self-study, Peercy and Troyan (Reference Peercy and Troyan2017) explored how to improve their practice of guiding novice teachers to discern and understand theoretical concepts (e.g., comprehensible input and scaffolding) in practice, and their findings pointed to the limitations of episteme-based approaches to LTE. The authors’ direct experience in authentic classrooms of the gap between episteme (expert abstract knowledge) and phronesis (perceptual knowledge) led to their advocate of a four-step cyclical relationship for phronesis and episteme. The cyclical process that involves examining existing conceptual knowledge, reflection on practice, refining conceptual knowledge, and rearticulation of practice could serve as a powerful model in reframing teacher educators’ approach to facilitating the cognitive learning of novice teachers.

In another collaborative self-study, Catalano et al. (Reference Catalano, Shende and Suh2018) identified and analyzed their multilingual pedagogies in LTE. Through writing journals and participating in collaborative sessions, the authors unearthed the importance of cultivating metalingual awareness, consideration of individual motivation, as well as empathy for language students, which comprised multilingual pedagogies in educating language teachers. Spiteri's (Reference Spiteri2010) self-investigation was situated in the context of boundary crossing, in particular, to an all-male secondary school in Malta. Taking a sabbatical leave to return to teaching 25 students English for one semester, she experimented with different strategies and found a middle ground that balanced her teaching beliefs and the actual classroom context. Her direct experience in the school helped her gain insights into authentic problems faced by language teachers, thus contributing to her practice of preparing student teachers for the challenging workplace. A similar experience was also reported by Yung (Reference Yung2020) who adopted the approach of autoethnography to investigate his own professional learning as he returned to secondary school as an intern teacher to enhance his pedagogical knowledge about language teaching in local classrooms.

Acknowledging the vitality and potential of boundary crossing, Yuan and Yang (Reference Yuan and Yang2020b) further explored how six Hong Kong-based teacher educators moved back and forth between universities and schools and between local and external contexts in their everyday work. The study found that multiple forms of boundary crossing could support teacher educators’ professional development, as ‘the gains in one form […] support their practice in another’ (p. 207). Despite the potential benefits, some teacher educators may feel a lack of impetus to move out of their comfort zone and show signs of inaction and ‘plateauing’. Yan et al.'s (Reference Yan, He, Guo and Wang2020) mixed method study, for example, revealed that 18 female mid-career teacher educators felt a sense of constrained autonomy because of personal and contextual obstacles (e.g., limited self-efficacy and lack of institutional support). Based on their findings, the authors called for external stimulus and support in facilitating teacher educators’ boundary crossing and continuing development.

The pool of seven studies discussed in this section have examined different professional development opportunities, ranging from macro governmental programs (e.g., Perry & Boodt, Reference Perry and Boodt2019) to micro discursive exchanges between individual teacher educators (e.g., Liu, Reference Liu2019). Teacher educators also engage in self-studies, both individual (e.g., Spiteri, Reference Spiteri2010) and collaborative (e.g., Peercy & Troyan, Reference Peercy and Troyan2017) in nature, with the goal of examining, refining, and transforming their own professional experiences. Congruent with the existing literature (Livingston, Reference Livingston2013; Loughran & Menter, Reference Loughran and Menter2019) in general education, the results of the studies tend to depict language teacher educators as motivated and agentive learners who continuously seek to refine and update their professional competence in spite of contextual challenges. Such a positive theme celebrates and emphasizes the power and potential of individual teacher educators (see Section 7.1), whereas relatively limited research and discussion has been given to the provision of policy, social, and resource support in preparing and developing language teacher educators at different stages of their career. Issues such as whether there is a need for formal programs in educating language teacher educators and how such programs can be designed and implemented warrant attention from TESOL researchers and policy makers.

5.4.2. Using ‘identity’ as a conceptual lens to understand language teacher educators’ professional development

One distinctive theme emanating from our review is the emergence of identity as a conceptual lens for examining and understanding language teacher educators’ lived experience and professional development. Identity, conceptualized to be a sociocultural product arising from the dynamic interactions of the individual with the social and cultural milieu (De Costa & Norton, Reference De Costa and Norton2017; Yuan, Reference Yuan2020), is essential in the continuous learning and growth of a teacher educator. As shown above, language teacher educators assume multiple responsibilities, which have naturally brought them a variety of identities such as teachers, practicum supervisors, collaborators, researchers, and learners. This resonates with the notion of ‘identity in practice’ as individuals enact and transform their identities through concrete, embodied engagement in situated communities (Wenger, Reference Wenger1998). Apart from revealing the multi-facetedness of language teacher educators’ identities, this cohort of studies (n = 15) have added new knowledge to the dynamic interactions (particularly the alignment and tensions) between different identities to account for their sense-making and professional development as language teacher educators.