ABSTRACT
A persistent challenge has faced tutor trainers and tutors at my adult learner institution since the inception of communicative online teaching in the mid-1990s. Language tutors who were very experienced at teaching languages in face-to-face tutorials were at that point invited to forge new skills in order to teach using real-time communication software for group work. Technical training provided by the institution soon proved insuffi cient, as even experienced teachers could not transfer their competencies straightforwardly to an online environment. More tools were developed to take account of the requirements of their discipline, such as Web-based toolkits and guides to good practice, which fulfi lled the basic needs of many (more than 100 language tutors trained with these tools in the fi rst decade and a half of our online operation) but left others unsatisfi ed and seeking further development (Lewis, 2006). Meanwhile, in research of a more generic kind, Peraya and Viens (2005) encapsulated the nature of the desired new competencies with the coinage “technopedagogical,” and argued against simplistic reliance on training guides, as “these often interminable lists say more about the culture’s objects than about the culture itself as a vital element of intervention” (p. 7). Technopedagogical development, they proposed, was cultural and depended on how individual variables, such as values, fears, motives, and “representations” (or perceptions) and structural variables, such as functions and roles, came together to form the culture of educators and educational managers. In 2007, I was able to put some fl esh on these abstractions, as I took the opportunity to turn a commission from a Latin-American university wishing to upskill its language teachers, into a practical and theoretical investigation into the nature of change in teacher education.
