Dear LANGSCAPE members and friends,

This is a call for collaboration and ideas coming from Stephan Breidbach, Katrin Schultze, and Bettina Kaiser (Humboldt University Berlin).

We will need you and your ideas for the upcoming conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Fremdspracenforschung (DGFF) on “Teaching Languages”.

We plan to initiate a discussion and research group to work on the topic of

“Teacher educators as professionals: Identities and professionalization in academic teacher training programmes”.

We will deal with the questions of

• what constitutes the professional identity of academic language teacher educators (i.e. those who teach future teachers of foreign languages) and
• how it affects the development of teacher identities in their students.

Our guiding questions presuppose that the professional identity of teacher educators has a major influence on how prospective teachers at the university level understand their future profession.

The group we hope to be able to initiate will work together for a research period of two years. It is our aim to present our findings at the next DGFF conference in 2017.

The purpose of this call is to collect ideas on this question in order to be able to organise an interesting, multi-layered discussion with some potential for further research. And – of course – we hope for your participation in the event itself.

All those interested, please send a mini-abstract (approx. 250 words) to kaiserbx@cms.hu-berlin.de (Bettina Kaiser) before 18 May 2015 briefly outlining your particular research interest in the question of professionalization of foreign language teacher educators.

Best regards from Berlin

Katrin, Bettina & Stephan