ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we have a personal conversation between two teacher educators. I, John, have been writing, speaking about, teaching, analysing recordings of classes and conversations with teachers and exploring how we teach and how we prepare teachers for decades. I, Takaaki, am a member of the more recent ‘seekers’ who want to understand what we do in new ways by questioning accepted practices, changing them in small ways and comparing the results. Our conversation enabled us to enhance a shared understanding of key elements of language teacher education and develop several suggestions for teacher educators. We believe that teacher educators should be encouraged to (a) make language teacher education a joint endeavour among the teacher educators, teachers and students; (b) generate teaching alternatives by trying the opposite and by using coding schemes; (c) cultivate teacher and learner autonomy by believing in their capacity – we can all do more than we think we can; (d) make small changes and attend to minute details; and (e) record and transcribe classroom interactions to see how what we think we did, what we actually did, and what we want to do are quite different events.
