AbstractThe effectiveness of professional development for future foreign language (FL)
professors is more salient than ever, given the significant role played by graduate
student instructors (GSIs) in undergraduate education and recent calls for change
in the collegiate FL curriculum requiring sophisticated understandings of integrating
the teaching of language, literature, and culture.
Taking a sociocultural theory perspective, this chapter reports on a study of
five FL GSIs’ experiences learning to teach that sought to determine how participation
in an advanced pedagogy seminar influenced GSIs’ notions of literacy as
a framing construct for collegiate FL curricula. Findings showed that through
involvement in the seminar, participants progressed toward a more theoretically
based definition of literacy and an awareness of its cognitive and sociocultural
dimensions. However, after the seminar, not all participants demonstrated alignment
in constructing their teaching practices through conceptual and pedagogical
tools of literacy.
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