This article describes the anatomy and dynamics of an online professional development activity, the Moodle fishbowl. The fishbowl was designed as an opportunity for experienced EFL educators to witness and make sense of instructional conversation strategies that they might themselves use as they migrate their EFL courses to blended and eventually fully online venues, venues where the roles and dynamics of interaction are decidedly different than those in the live classroom. A major emphasis in this professional development sequence was to raise faculty awareness of the unique affordances on which they, as experienced language educators, might capitalize through observation of authentic examples of responsive online instructional strategies. To that end, three-week-long collaborations were established between participating faculty's EFL students and a ‘cultural expert’ in the US. The cultural experts were doctoral students in language technology who employed instructional conversation strategies with the EFL students as part of informal, authentic asynchronous threaded discourse topics. The role of the faculty in training was to observe these conversations by looking into the metaphorical fishbowl, reflect on the anatomy and impact of these online instructional conversations, and report back to the group as a whole. The following narrates the rationale, processes and outcomes of this Moodle fishbowl professional development sequence and suggests future considerations in supporting language educators as they move some or all of their instruction online.

A key role in the successful implementation of any learning approach is played by teachers, so how well blended learning works will depend largely on how well teachers make the transition from their traditional face-to-face classroom roles to the wider more complex role that blended learning requires. The additional skills and the forging of a new professional identity might not come easily to all practitioners.

This paper evaluates the impact that the introduction of blended learning in a distance language learning course has had on teachers. It presents and discusses findings from a small-scale evaluation study which compared quantitative and qualitative data gathered through a survey and a small number of interviews with participant observations from the researcher and the institutional end-of-course debriefing report.

The paper argues that whilst technological challenges and the sheer amount of change that teachers were faced with were largely responsible for some of the negative attitudes reflected in teachers’ opinions about the course, a less obvious, broader explanation for the difficulties that teachers encountered might be found in the way that learning, teaching and training are conceptualised by both teachers and the institution.

It is proposed that a transmission of knowledge approach to training fails to acknowledge and properly support the transformation of teachers’ identity that results from moving from traditional classroom-based teaching to online teaching. The shift goes beyond the acquisition of ICT skills and requires a pedagogical understanding of the affordances of the new medium and an acceptance by the teacher of his or her new role and identity.

This article describes the contradictions reported by student-teachers in Barcelona who engaged in telecollaboration with transatlantic peers via Second Life, during their initial training in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. The data analysis draws upon Grounded Theory and is theoretically informed by Activity Theory and the notion of contradictions. The study discusses technology-based, intra- and inter-institutional contradictions, their impact on the development of the telecollaborative activity, and outcomes in bolstering student-teachers’ conceptual understanding of Network-Based Language Instruction.

Several authors (e.g., Mcniff & Whitehead, 2006; Wallace, 1998) defend the idea that teachers’ own involvement in research has the potential to encourage professional growth. Journal writing, teacher logs, written narratives and stimulated recall are some examples of methods that have been used by researchers to encourage and support teachers’ reflective practice in teacher-researcher collaborative research. This paper discusses the use of video-stimulated reflection as both a research method and as a means for teacher professional growth. The research findings are drawn from a longitudinal study that investigates a model of Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) technology professional development programme. The research was carried out in the form of seven in-depth case studies with English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in German secondary/vocational schools, as they learn how to integrate the IWB into their teaching. Research data were collected via a variety of research instruments, namely classroom observations and field notes, video recordings of school lessons and teacher training workshops, interviews and video-stimulated reflection. Findings based on the analysis of the copious amount of data gathered indicate that the video-stimulated dialogues were used by the teachers as effective opportunities for reflection, self-evaluation and pedagogical development.

This qualitative study investigates the relationship between learning opportunities and teacher cognition in the context of a videoconferencing (VC) project for foreign languages (FL) in French primary schools. Six generalist primary teachers were followed throughout the initial six-month stage of the initiative, and data were collected from learners, teachers, and trainers via questionnaire, video and audio recordings of class and feedback sessions, online teacher and trainer discussion, and video-stimulated recall interviews. Interview data revealed distinct teacher profiles involving differences in orientation to teaching and the teacher, learning and learners, and technology. These profiles corresponded to different teaching strategies and resulted in varying patterns of learner interaction in VC sessions. Teachers’ comments showed them to be guided by general rather than FL-specific pedagogical principles, and pedagogical concerns frequently intersected with technical issues as teachers learned to exploit the new VC technology. While most teachers valued spontaneous FL interaction as a key VC affordance, the filmed sessions revealed little unplanned learner-learner communication. This finding is related to teachers’ views of second language acquisition as product rather than a process; for more learner-centred teachers, spontaneity was affected by rehearsal, and for more teacher-oriented practitioners, sustained teacher intervention influenced patterns of learner participation. In addition to these classroom findings, the study highlights the value of this type of participant research in facilitating the exchange of resources and expertise, classroom video footage, and participants’ comments and queries, and thus contributing to professional development in CALL and CMC-based teacher education.

Despite the spread of reliable desktop audio and videoconferencing facilities, some CMC-based projects still rely on asynchronous written environments, if only because of the temporal constraints of synchronicity (Guichon, 2009; Develotte, Guichon & Vincent, 2010). Yet speaking is usually the skill students most need to improve when learning a second language (L2). This paper therefore sets out to measure the impact of distant written exchanges between Native Speakers (NS) and Non Native Speakers (NNS) on the development of NNS L2 oral output, focusing specifically on the effect of phonological nativisation. The context of this study is a teacher training programme for future primary school teachers in France. During their L2 course aiming to help them improve their mastery of English, they were given the opportunity to take part in a CMC-based project with PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education) students from King's College, London. Action research was thus carried out to examine the potential of this project in the development of the participants’ L2 oral output.

The L2 course being task-oriented, the trainee teachers’ L2 oral output was evaluated by means of pre- and post-tests based on tasks. The results show that stability prevails over progress, which is in keeping with the fact that interlanguage development is a long process (Chapelle, 2003: 119). The results also confirm the importance of phonological nativisation when learners have access only to written authentic input.