ABSTRACT
The nature of the relationship between theory and practice in language teaching and teacher education is a complex one. Edge and Richards
(1998b:573) highlight an inconsistency within the status quo of theorybuilding/research procedures in that the importance of practical, localised, and contextual understandings are discounted in favour of generalised conceptual frameworks (see also Bernhardt and Tedick 1991:43). Referring to Guba and Lincoln (1982), they advise that we need to work towards developing a paradigm sensitive to real world conditions as opposed to trying to manipulate practical conditions to meet the requirements of specifi c paradigms. As has often been suggested, there is much of a divide between theoretical concepts and real world contextualised practice in the fi eld of education and second language acquisition (Wallace 1991:10-11), and it is generally accepted that as well as theory not being suffi ciently informed by practice, neither is practice suffi ciently informed by theory (Crookes 2007:123). Kinginger (1997:8) pinpoints the problem and solution as follows:
The practice of teachers is very likely not a matter of applied theory, nor are teachers to be construed as mere consumers of research fi ndings. Rather it is important to ask how teachers achieve a coherent system of knowledge to inform their own practice, how they make sense of expertise.
