The attention for teacher educators as professionals and their professional development is indeed increasing. While much of the attention has been directed to novice teacher educators little has been paid to experienced teacher educators and their particular developmental activities. This paper presents findings on teacher educators’ professional development. 25 interviews were conducted, mainly with experienced teacher educators in Israel, The Netherlands and Japan. Teacher educators’ concerns vary across their careers. During their induction they are rather focused on surviving, whereas later on in their careers their concerns are linked to their own professional identity and their students as individuals. A large number of participants were involved in research and they all experience research as an important mean for their professional development. All participants were involved in formal and informal learning activities and they have plans for their further professional development but sometimes foresee hinders, like resources and time, to realize their plans. The interview data did not provide any strong evidence to suggest country-specific patterns.
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When teaching grammar, one of the biggest challenges teachers face is how to make their students achieve conceptual understanding. Some scholars have argued that metaconcepts from theoretical linguistics should be used to pedagogically and conceptually enrich traditional L1 grammar teaching, generating more opportunities for conceptual understanding. However, no empirical evidence exists to support this theoretical position. The current study is the first to explore the role of linguistic metaconcepts in the grammatical reasoning of university students of Dutch Language and Literature. Its goal was to gain a better understanding of the characteristics of students’ grammatical conceptual knowledge and reasoning and to investigate whether students’ reasoning benefits from an intervention that related linguistic metaconcepts to concepts from traditional grammar. Results indicate, among other things, that using explicit linguistic metaconcepts and explicit concepts from traditional grammar is a powerful contributor to the quality of students’ grammatical reasoning. Moreover, the intervention significantly improved students’ use of linguistic metaconcepts.
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