ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of Vygotsky's ideas on school teaching/learning or, in Russian, obuchenie, and build a rationale for why we use obuchenie as a lens through which to explore responsive mediation in the practices of L2 teacher education. It reviews Vygotsky's views on emotion, in particular the notion of emotional experience or, in Russian, perezhivanie, a construct that enables us to better understand how teachers are experiencing and responding to the practices of L2 teacher education. The chapter includes Vygotsky's claim of the affective and volitional tendency as central to teacher cognition, and explores the role of emotion in the learning-to-teach process, as well as how teacher educator and teacher emotions and motives shape their interactions. It invokes McNeill's construct of growth points as a moment or series of moments when teachers' cognitive/emotional dissonance comes into being and argues that responsive mediation directed at the growth point creates the potential for the development of L2 teacher/teaching expertise.
