“To make the tacit explicit”: Teacher education, emerging discourse, and conceptions of teaching

The influence of teacher education on teaching is a problematic area, both in practice and in research. Often, because much research adopts a “first-order” perspective which focuses on teachers' behaviors, influences of teacher education are seen as temporary, negligible, or difficult to determine. The study reported here grew out of a general concern to document, via a “second-order” perspective which examines their thinking and perceptions, how teachers modify or improve what they do through formal teacher education. It addresses three important areas which have received little attention in recent research: foreign language teaching, in-service graduate education, and the role of a shared, professional discourse in developing teachers' conceptions of teaching. The paper presents a summary of the findings of an 18-month longitudinal study which examined how foreign language teachers' conceptions of their classroom practice developed as they took part in an in-service teacher education program. The paper discusses how the program's shared professional discourse contributes to increasing the complexity of the teachers' thinking about their teaching and suggests that as they learn to articulate their de facto ways of thinking in the shared discourse, the teachers gain greater control over their classroom practice and are thus more able to shape it to their own ends.