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ABSTRACT
This article argues that greater engagement with social realism is beneficial for Second Language Teacher Education (SLTE) programme development and delivery. Because social realism offers a layered, non - reductive view of society and social phenomena, it grounds SLTE programmes within a robust social ontology, thus allowing programme designers and participants to move beyond the problems posed by dominant structuralist and interactionist perspectives. Specifically, a social realist approach to SLTE allows researchers, training programme organisers and teachers to understand language learning and teaching as a complex, layered and contingent educational reality, and answer fundamental questions such as: What is(are) language(s)? What is education? How can language teaching/learning help people to overcome social inequalities? and What is language teacher agency? These questions are of crucial importance to SLTE programmes. Providing theoretical justification and practical examples, this article makes the point that an SLTE approach grounded in social realism can potentially contribute to sustainable teacher and learner agency, engagement and motivation.
KEYWORDS
Second language teacher education, social realism, agency, TESOL.
1. INTRODUCTION
Organised commitment to high-quality teacher preparation is crucial to successful language learning programmes. However, the meaning of high-quality is understood in radically different ways depending on the epistemological point of departure. Some may regard language teaching mainly as a situated process in which students' intellectual curiosity should be the main focus, and second language teacher education (SLTE) as providing the tools to deal with the contingent nature of language pedagogy in a complex social world. From this perspective, careful attention is paid to how teachers perceive and understand their lived experiences (i.e., the interactionist approach). On the other hand, some view the role of educators more narrowly, instead focusing on the objects of study as systems/structures to be internalised (e.g., language teaching methodologies), and by extension viewing education as a process of producing a competitive labour force with "skills and ideologically compliant attitudes" (Hill, 2007, p. 204) (i.e., the structuralist angle). Although numerous nuanced positions exist between these two poles, for progress in SLTE to be made the ideological tensions between them should be resolved. The current article argues that a social realist approach to SLTE can, to some extent, help programme designers and participants to resolve these tensions.
These conflicting visions have...