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Introduction
Lesson study, first known as a primary means of professional development among schoolteachers in Japan, has attracted great research attention around the world. Being a cyclical process where teachers jointly plan, implement and study a lesson, lesson study serves as a viable approach to advancing teachers’ pedagogical understanding of students’ learning and adapting their teaching strategies accordingly (Clivaz, 2018). It also serves as a meaningful platform for collaborative engagement among teachers to stimulate classroom innovations and curriculum reforms (Skott and Møller, 2017). As Lewis (2002) rightfully argues, lesson study is a simple idea, as the obvious answer toward improvement of instruction is to collaborate with fellow teachers to plan, observe and reflect on lessons. Yet, this simple idea has transformative impacts – through engaging in lesson study, teachers are afforded the opportunity to turn the otherwise private classrooms into an open site for systematic inquiry and collaborative knowledge building (Zhang et al., 2019).
Despite the popularity of lesson study, it has mostly been adopted as a professional development mode for in-service teachers, and rarely incorporated into pre-service teacher education courses (Angelini and Álvarez, 2018). Such a gap gives impetus to the present study to examine the potential of lesson study in supporting student teachers’ professional learning in language teacher education. In particular, the study draws on the approach of “same lesson/content and different design”, or Tong Ke Yi Gou (同课异构), as a popular mode of lesson study in the Chinese educational settings (Bai et al., 2019). While Tong Ke Yi Gou follows the traditional practice of lesson study that engages teachers in collaborative lesson planning, implementation and reflections (Lee and Tan, 2020; Lewis and Perry, 2014), it embraces a strong element of comparison and even competitiveness in the Chinese school context. Specifically, it requires different teachers to teach the same content/topic to compare their own lesson design and instructional processes, while being observed by colleagues and teacher educators who offer critical comments and suggestions for follow-up revisions and improvement (Sun et al., 2015). Previous studies (e.g. Bai, 2014; Chen, 2017) have found Tong Ke Yi Gou to be highly beneficial for the participating teachers in improving pedagogical practices, as teachers can engage in a high level of cognitive analysis and...