SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION: INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES

Extract

SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION: INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES. Diane J. Tedick (Ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005. Pp. xxiv + 348. $79.95 cloth, $36.50 paper.

One of the most difficult, complex, and seemingly intractable problems facing second language (L2) educators, especially in the United States, has been the tendency to restrict discussions and interactions to particular areas of specialization: foreign language education, teachers of English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), bilingual education, and so on. The causes of this professional Balkanization are myriad and are beyond our concern here. What is important, in my view, is that language educators learn to cross these artificial boundaries that divide us and recognize the common concerns, themes, and issues that unite us. Tedick's edited volume is an invaluable contribution to this effort. It brings together language educators from a variety of specializations to examine the preparation of both pre-service and in-service language educators. In fact, it does even more than this because the contributors to this volume also represent a widely divergent international group as well as an interesting and valuable mix of both researchers and practitioners at different levels. The book contains a total of 18 chapters, divided into four thematic sections that deal, respectively, with the knowledge base of L2 teacher education, the contexts of L2 teacher education, collaborations in L2 teacher education, and L2 teacher education in practice. Each thematic section of the book is introduced by a brief essay by the editor, which provides both an overview of the chapters included and a sense of how the papers relate to each other and to the remainder of the volume. Although each chapter is placed in a particular thematic section of the book, it should be noted that it is clear that most, in fact, address issues that cross several—and, in some cases, all—of the four organizational themes.