ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the key tenets of Cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) and its relationship to the Chilean study. First, Vygotsky's ideas of learning and cognition as social engagement were discussed and then the chapter offers an overview of three generations of activity theory and a review of its main uses as a research tool in teacher-education contexts. The discussion provided a general theoretical framework to understand the study of how pre-service teachers learnt to teach EFL in Chile. Second, the methodological implications of a CHAT perspective resided in looking holistically at how pre-service teachers learnt as an activity analysing pre-service teachers' motives, actions, artefacts and relations with the school community and university community. Finally, it presents some of the key findings of the empirical study and explores the activity of learning to teach EFL through analysis of the curriculum of the programme as a tool that mediated pre-service teachers' learning.
