Symposium: “Language of Reflection – Reflection of Language” in Foreign Language Teacher Education

05.03.2021

Organized by Manuela Wipperfürth

On March the 5th and 6th of March 2021 eight researchers from Austria, the Czech Republic and Germany met online to discuss questions of reflection in foreign language teacher education in a mix of presentations, discussions and also a small Friday evening celebration. The international symposium was organized by Manuela Wipperfürth, CELTER Vienna, and Miroslav Jánik, Department of German Language and Literature Department Masaryk University Brno.

Many teacher training programmes aim at practice-orientation and most of them take a reflective stance towards practice. Thus, the negotiation and discussion of reflections of practice becomes a core feature of teacher education. The focus of this special issue is thus the reflective processes in teacher education and, as a consequence, it considers ways of how student teachers can be prepared for and aided towards developing their professional language of teaching. In addition, we aim at understanding the concepts of this professional language and how is it conceptualized and realised by practitioners and students during their professional development.

We address concepts of professional vision (Goodwin, 1994; Sherin & van Es, 2005; Lefstein & Snell, 2011) and professional language (Wipperfürth, 2016) and their implications for reflection, as well as formats of teacher education that promote reflection of practice and that at combining teaching practice and its reflection to empower professional development of (future) teachers. Whereas much research focuses on reflective tasks and reflective competences, so far, little attention has been given to the linguistic aspect of it.

The presenters at the symposium will also contribute to a special issue of Orbis Scholae.  (https://pages.pedf.cuni.cz/uvrv-en/orbis-scholae/)